“The mission had icebergs on one end, mountains on the other, and the bot would have to lift trash out of the iceberg and take it to the recycling area. You want to do it in the least amount of moves as possible,” she said.

Nine-year-old Revan Gouge explained to the McDowell News how the group programmed the robot.

“It’s got a thing on the top and you are able to plug a wire in the top and you program on the computer and then we send it to the brain. Then we unplug it and then press the buttons on the brain and then it does what we program it to do. The brain makes it do whatever it does. We just have to program it to the brain and poof it works. I hope to add more parts to it,” he said.

The robot can go forward, backward, and do pivot and progressive turns.

“We have been practicing on trying to pick stuff up with it. We have had a lot of fails,” said Gouge.

“It’s been hard trying to do it,” Patrick Westmoreland said. “We tried to do a 360 and it actually worked.”

Harper Webb, 10, said the robot had programming already installed.