Every year, the Praxidyn Team presents Innovation Awards to a 4-H member and an FFA member at the Iowa State Fair. This year’s winners show exactly why we keep coming back.
For several years now, our Praxidyn Team has presented Innovation Awards at the Iowa State Fair — one to a 4-H member and one to an FFA member who show outstanding innovation, engineering, and growth in mechanical, electrical, or electronic design. Every year we look forward to the judging, and every year the same question comes up: what are we actually looking for?
It isn’t always the shiniest project or the biggest budget. We look for evidence that a student has genuinely learned something — that they’ve dug into engineering because they wanted to understand it, not just finish it. We look for thinking that goes outside the box. And we look for grit, because real innovation almost never works the first time. This year’s two winners had all of it in abundance.
The Eaglebots: From One Remaining Member to World Championship
Our 4-H award went to the Eaglebots, a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team. Three years ago, graduations had whittled the team down to a single remaining member. Instead of folding, they recruited twelve new members over one summer and rebuilt from scratch. A year and a half later, they qualified for the World Championships in Houston for the first time in the team’s twelve-year history.
This season’s game required stacking two robots vertically inside an 18-inch box — and out of more than 7,000 teams worldwide, the Eaglebots were the only team to solve it by turning their robot into a ramp, letting their partner drive up onto it like a flatbed truck. That solution earned them the Innovation Award at Worlds.
Just as impressive to us: nineteen iterations of their drive system, trigonometry from the classroom applied to auto-aim their ball launcher, and a children’s book about engineering that team members wrote, illustrated, and read at local libraries to pull the next generation in behind them.
Keegan Grundmeier: An Idea That Kept Growing
Our FFA award went to Keegan Grundmeier, a sophomore at South Hamilton. Keegan has been working on one evolving project since sixth grade. It started as an automatic feeder for his bottle calf. When his feeding plan required knowing what his cattle actually weighed, he welded up a scale frame, set four load cells under a grate, wired them to an Arduino, wrote his own iPhone app, and built the server software that ties it all together — running on the PC in his bedroom.
Nobody handed them a solution. The Eaglebots could have stacked robots the way everyone else did; Keegan could have bought a scale. Instead, they asked whether there was a better way — and did the unglamorous work to find out.
From a State Fair Project to Mixmate
Here’s what strikes us about both winners. Nobody handed them a solution. The Eaglebots could have stacked robots the way everyone else did; Keegan could have bought a scale. Instead, they asked whether there was a better way and then did the unglamorous work — the iterations, the late nights, the failed attempts — to find out and learn.
We can tell you where that path leads because we’ve walked it. The very core of Mixmate started as one of these state fair projects, and it grew, iteration by iteration, into the system our company builds today. When we watch these students present, we’re not just seeing a nice exhibit — we’re seeing someone who has a foundation that will propel them into success. That’s why our family and the Praxidyn Team keep coming back to present these awards.
Agriculture’s future is in good hands. Congratulations to the Eaglebots and to Keegan — and to every 4-H and FFA member who entered. Keep building.
Built by the same kind of thinking. Mixmate started as a state fair project and grew into the automated chemical mixing and recordkeeping system ag retailers and applicators trust today. Read our story.
