Cal Poly float wins Sweepstakes Award at 2025 Rose Parade

January 1, 2026

By KAREN VELIE

Cal Poly universities’ “Jungle Jumpstart” rainforest float that showed how nature and technology work together to create a better world received the Sweepstakes Award at the 137th Rose Parade held on a rainy New Year’s Day.

The prestigious honor — a first in the schools’ nearly eight decades in the parade — honors the most beautiful float overall and is typically won by larger, commercially built floats or major organizations, not by self-built entries that include the California State University campuses.

“It’s really remarkable to win this award and celebrate it, especially on this year’s theme,” Cal Poly Rose float President Aubrey Goings said the after the awards were announced prior to the parade. “We’re really just ecstatic, especially because this year’s theme — ‘The Magic in Teamwork’ — and us winning this is really celebrating our teamwork how we get together and make everything from scratch, learning from each other.”

Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and California State Polytechnic University in Pomona team up for the Pasadena classic every year. The entry not only exudes teamwork in the way it looks but also the process by which it is constructed.

Measuring 53 feet long, 25 feet high and 18 feet wide, “Jungle Jumpstart,” explores the 2026 parade theme by showcasing the dynamics of a unique partnership through the story of rainforest denizens restoring a 40-foot robot friend.

More than 60 students, equally split from each campus, worked to finish the float designed by Zander DeRenard, a Cal Poly Pomona mechanical engineering senior and two-year veteran of the team.

Student float leaders were excited for the story of the old, rundown robot in the jungle, and the forest animals bringing their friend back to life by incorporating what they know best — the jungle.

Wires spark as a robot slumbering in a dense, jungle undergrowth blinks back to life, lifting its head to observe its new surroundings. Two ring-tailed lemurs work to reconnect a broken wire in the robot’s leg, while a sleepy jaguar perches on the other, chewing a vine, tail dancing blissfully.

A tree frog positions a wood panel on the robot’s right arm, as the supervising toucan rotates its head, carefully inspecting the progress. The restored robot’s eyes, made of 2-foot digital screens, stare at a brightly colored macaw held in its mechanical hand, lifting the bird as it readies to fly.

The students showed further innovation through an assortment of electronic lighting to show the spark that brings the robot and story to life.

This scene proved to be more difficult than previous years’ floats, because of the density of harder-to-acquire tropical plants; however, the students solved this by being creative and collaborating with the community.