Challenge. Accepted.

This is the motto of the Red Alert Robotics team. Every year the team builds a different robot to compete in a game that has specific tasks to complete.

The game for this year is called Destination: Deep Space. As with every game, it poses a series of challenges that the team will have to overcome in order to compete well and win events.

“[The game] is essentially six rocket ships on the field, and there are spots to put cargo and hatches onto the ships. At the end of the game there’s a habitat platform that you have to climb onto,” junior design captain Chase Rivas said. “That’s going to be the biggest challenge is getting onto the platform, the biggest one is going to be a foot and ten inches off the ground so we have to find a way to get the robot onto it.”

With competition season fast approaching, the team is quickly beginning to build their robot. The team will have six weeks to design, program and build the robot.

“At the end of the six weeks, we have to literally put the robot in a bag, and we can’t touch it until we get to our first competition,” senior team captain Veronica Strange said.

Because of the limited timeframe, the robotics team breaks into smaller teams in order to divide the work and work more efficiently.

“We have four sub-teams that are each responsible for a part of the robot and they coordinate with each other to create the whole thing,” junior shop manager Josh Stevenson said. “Then we CAD them so we can machine the robot well, and then we build a replica of the field that we can use to test our robot on.”

Strange works with the other captains in order to make sure the robot gets completed. During the first couple of weeks, her main focus is helping Rivas make sure the design of the robot will be effective and efficient.

“Our biggest thing that we focus on during the build season is designing the robot in our program system, CAD, and working with the rest of the team to design and come up with the best ways to build the robot and make it complete the challenge,” Rivas said.

Even though building the robot is the biggest concern during build season, Red Alert’s media team is also hard at work.

“I am in charge of making the t-shirt’s and designing them, and we make buttons and sticker and stamps to give out at competitions, which we do during build season,” senior media captain Gabby Scifres said. “We also have a YouTube channel and upload a segment of Red Alert on air each week to give updates on the build season. We have a website that is called redalert1741.org along with many social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.”

Center Grove will be hosting their first robotics competition on March 29-30 in the Vandermeer Gymnasium. The competition is free and open to everyone.