Beneath the din of a packed auditorium and amid a flurry of four-wheeled robots whirring smoothly about the competition ring, the Thomas Jefferson High School robotics club’s own metal creation sat motionlessly.

It was Saturday, day one of the two-day FIRST Robotics Competition at Auburn High School, and the Jefferson ‘bot was dead in the water to start its round.

Seven other robots from the seven other high school teams spent all of the round traversing various artificial terrain traps and using mechanized “arms” to hurl volleyballs at a target 10 feet above the ground, but the brainchild of Jefferson’s RAID Robotics – the first word an acronym for Raider Artificial Intelligence Division – got its gears in gear with barely 30 seconds left.

It was an impressive half-minute, but none of the TJ students that had designed, programmed, built and piloted the robot looked hopeful.

Which was too bad, since the team would finish day two with the highest total score of all 36 teams and advanced victorious to the Pacific Northwest regional competition in Portland April 6-9.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an international high school program that lets school teams be involved in all aspects of designing a working robot, and Federal Way and Thomas Jefferson high schools both competed this year. The mechanical competitors are built at great cost, from the ground up, and to rigorous specifications – all within six weeks during the school year.

“During those six weeks, we do Monday through Saturday,” said Blake Stevens, a math teacher at Federal Way High School who sponsors the schools RoboEagles team. “During the week it’s three to four hours a day, then on Saturday it’s 9-5. The students dedicate a lot of time to this.”

So, of course, do the staff mentors, but time is really the height of their dedication. The imagination, elbow grease, and technical know-how comes almost entirely from the bright minds of the students involved.

“All of the designing, fabricating and putting together is done by high school kids,” said Tod Byquist, the Thomas Jefferson team’s mentor.

“I got into this because they needed a programmer,” said Jaden Bottemiller, a senior at Federal Way High School, who writes the code that makes the robot tick. “Then I got hooked and couldn’t stop. If you do something wrong here you could break a mechanism. That’s a lot worse than just breaking desktop app.”

Replacing an app, of course, costs time and energy. Replacing a mechanism costs time and energy as well, but it also costs real money – a lot of which is also needed for school teams to compete.

“It’s about $15,000,” Stevens said. “Boeing and OSPI cover some; the rest is students fundraising. A lot of people in the community are really excited about robotics.”

Byquist agreed, noting dryly that entry into the competition gets a team a 100-page rule book, the radio transmitter and the control panel – everything else is up to the team.

According to Kevin Ross, one of the first people to start pushing the competition in Washington state, the FIRST Robotics Competition was a small network of well-off schools until about 2007, when the state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction started carving out grant money for it and other science, technology, engineering and math – or STEM – groups.

After that it spread quickly, attracting the attention of high-tech employers like Boeing who realized that, with a deep and pre-existing interest in science and engineering, the kids involved in the competition were essentially a college degree away from being ready-to-succeed workers.

“At the time we got involved there was a study that said industries were missing 70,000 engineers, and that number has held pretty constant,” Ross said. “A lot of time is spent trying to generate the supply side of STEM education. We approached it from the other side – we said, ‘Where’s the demand?’ This (robotics) creates that demand. Once they see what they can do with STEM skills they start taking some of the STEM classes and thinking about STEM careers.”

Abby Hyde, a Thomas Jefferson freshman, is in the first part of creating that demand.

“I really like science and math,” she said. “This is a lot of that, and you can see how different parts affect other parts.”

Najeem Tirhi, meanwhile, is nearing the end of the demand-generating process. The 19-year-old first-year University of Washington student is an alumnus of Thomas Jefferson’s robotics team. He’s in school to study civil engineering and stopped in Saturday to observe.

Tirhi said students can get an awful lot out of an early interest in robotics.

“Every aspect you could hope to learn you can learn here,” he said.

Kellie Essig, a spokesperson for FIRST, sums it up with a satisfied certainty.

“This is a sport where everybody who wants to can go pro,” she said. “There’s a job for every one of these kids that wants to do this.”