“And the winner of the 2013-2014 robotics competition is…BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.” Cooper Peterson’s dream is interrupted by the sound of his alarm clock. After a groggy wake up call, Cooper finds himself at his Lego robotics meeting, working on his robot for the final mission at Rochester High School in December.

Working on their final project, Cooper explains what you have to do.” The robot starts out where the judges place it, and then they tell you where you have to go. you have to program to get to the area, but there is stuff in the way! You have to avoid these little one inch blocks and if we knock them over we get points taken away, from our final score.

Teams are split up into a  three person unit, each having a programmer, builder, and leader. There are two types of programs that these teams can use, NXT and NXC. NXT is a picture program, which has blocks that they can drag onto the screen and use them for the program to make the robot move in any direction. There is also NXC, which is a program a lot like java, where you write up the program using words and symbols.