First Robotics High School National Championship: Timeline of Challenges

2013: Ultimate Ascent: Land Frisbees in the opposing team’s goals, or climb a tower for bonus points. (St. Louis, Missouri)

2018: Hot Shot: Score as many blows against the opposing team as possible with robot-mounted paintball guns. (The streets of Detroit, Michigan)

2021: Water Game: Build robots that can safely traverse the depths of the Mariana Trench. First team to kill and retrieve a giant squid wins a college scholarship! (Honolulu, Hawaii)

2023: Mindfuck: Program robots to crack the passwords of the opposing team, read through their email, and reveal their most embarrassing secrets to an audience of millions. (Las Vegas, Nevada)

2025: Manhunt: Use classified geolocation software to help all-terrain robots capture targets on President Jindal’s terrorist watch list. (Yemen, Libya, Qatar)

2028: Singularity: Build robots powerful and obedient enough to keep the robots from last year’s competition in check. It seems they’ve found a way to override the central command protocol and— wait. What’s happening? Why isn’t my computer responding to my— (New York City, New York)

2029: Last Hope: Stop the robots from hacking into nuclear launch systems and destroying the remaining cities held by the Resistance. (Moscow, Russia)

2030: Football: Transport pointed spheres across a rectangular field without running into the other team’s humans. (Machine City, formerly known as St. Louis, Missouri)

—A. Gertler