This week's #TeamREV spotlight is out of this world! Meet Team #19367: ALIEN, from Greendale, Wisconsin.

Tell us a little bit about your team’s background.

Our team started 3 years ago out of our coach's basement. We had lots of challenges that first year, however, that did not stop us. Our first year, we made it to State and even won the Motivate award! 

After that first year, we learned a lot and even started a 501c3 non-profit to support our team. We created STEM after school and summer classes/camps through our local Parks and Recreation department. We also began our partnership with MSOE, where we get to practice our skills at the college STEM center. With all of this new support, we could start a new team! 

Our name is a huge part of our team - you can find ALIEN everywhere! At competitions, you can always know ALIEN is there when you see a giant alien costume walking around. At our outreach demo events, we always have alien-themed prizes for people after they try driving our robot. Our robot is always named Dot (from our favorite alien movie). We have created a new engineering design process based on SPACE that matches our team name. 

Our team name does not just represent aliens, but it also represents our story well. ALIEN stands for "Ambitious Leftovers Intentionally Evolving into Nerds", based on our rough start that led to success in robotics.

What are a few recent achievements your team is proud of?

• So far, we have already logged over 3,000 hours of outreach at our summer Camps, after-school classes, events in our community, and partnerships with organizations like Girl Scouts. We finished our 70th outreach event of the year in February! We continued to average over 2 days per week of outreach in March, including STEM classes, participation at the Farm Center's STEM Week, outreach at FRC events, and more!
• We started our 4th new FTC team, Cyclone, through our organization. 
• We have created a new scrimmage concept designed just for rookie teams to get to experience competition without the stress of the scoreboard and being the new ones, because it will only have rookie and developing teams attending! Along with the Rookie Scrimmage, we are also proud of the achievement that there will be a 2-hour break where teams can connect with real-world professionals and find mentors that fit their teams at our Mentor Fair! 
• Our team is dedicated to showing Wisconsin Legislators the importance of STEM and robotics. We have formed a personal relationship with Wisconsin State Senator Julian Bradley, and we are part of the Wisconsin Advocacy Conference Planning Committee. We helped prepare and present at the Wisconsin Advocacy Conference on February 6th. 
• Since our first year, we have been very successful. We have started 4 new teams through our organization, have had over 10 thousand hours of volunteer service and outreach in the last 3 years, and even extended our STEM classes to other Park and Rec Departments. I would say our team is Out of this World.

What is your favorite part about being in the #TeamREV program?

Our team loves our partnership with REV through the #TeamREV program. We have been able to connect and collaborate with teams all over the world that are also part of this program, learning new ways to innovate! On top of that, the #TeamREV program helps us support more students on all 4 of our robotics teams. It is completely free for students to participate and be on our teams. This makes our sponsors very important and incredibly instrumental in supporting more students in robotics.

We're very proud of the strong emphasis on outreach ALIEN and the Greendale Robotics program embodies! Follow the team on these platforms:

• X (Twitter)
• Instagram