My son Alex should have spent more time this spring on his homework. Instead, he spent it building a robot.

Let me explain. Alex, 14, is a member of the SciBorgs — the Bronx High School of Science robotics team. He and two dozen other team members took part in an annual competition sponsored by the US charity FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Each January, FIRST challenges high-school teams to build, in six weeks, a robot able to compete with other robots in performing complex tasks like climbing stairs and stacking pyramids. This year the competition attracted over 42 000 high-school students in 1684 teams, mainly from the US but also 10 other countries, including five teams from Israel, 10 from Canada and three from the UK.

FIRST was founded two decades ago by the award-winning inventor Dean Kamen, whose innovations range from the insulin pump to the two-wheeled, gyroscopically balanced Segway personal transporter. Kamen and his colleagues were worried about declining student interest in hands-on technology education, and the trend for programmes that teach students not with hands-on experience but with computer screens. Real creativity requires extensive experience with materials and tools, the absence of which threatens not only engin­eering education, but any kind of experimental science and technology.

“To think conceptually, you first need experience in the physical world,” Michael Dubno, chair of FIRST in New York, told me at one competition. “You have to understand the materials viscerally — what makes them work, what makes them break — before you can program them. Experience in the physical world leads to deeper theoretical understanding. Schools nowadays think they can leave out the physical step — that it’s just vocational. You can’t.”

The most effective way to engage students, FIRST’s founders decided, was to stage events that were both competitive and collaborative, in an atmosphere that had all the hoopla of high-school sports. Every year, it presents a fresh challenge. “In school, it goes like this: ‘Teach, practise, test. Repeat.’ In FIRST, it’s the opposite: ‘Here’s a problem with no obvious solution. Solve it!’[It is obvious which] one actually turns on your brain,” explains Dubno.

Lunar lunacy

The challenge this year — the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing — was called “Lunacy”. Teams had to design and build a robot to move around a low-friction playing field made of a polymer material called Regolith to simulate driving on the lunar surface. The robot had to collect balls, or “Moon rocks”, and deposit them in trailers. Alex and the other SciBorgs — and members of their all-girl sibling team the Iron (Fe²⁶) Maidens — stayed after school until late at night, and worked on weekends, to feverishly complete their robot.

The SciBorgs’ regional final took place in March at New York City’s Javits Convention Center. Shortly after they arrived, an inspector told the team that its last-minute tinkering had put the robot 5 kg over the weight limit. Alex and others scrambled to remove support bars and cut holes in structural elements. Desperate, they also removed the compressor that powered the actuators of the shooting mechanism, hoping to rely on tanks of compressed air. But during the practice round, the actuators ran out of air. The team quickly reinstalled the compressor, sacrificing air tanks and more support bars.

A total of 66 teams took turns squaring off on a playing field roughly 16.5 m by 11 m in size. Each match was a competition between two alliances of three robots each. NASA was even present, providing welding machines and other equipment to aid robot-builders who needed to make repairs. “For the kids, the robot makes the connection between the textbook and the real world,” NASA support engineer Robert Thate told me. “You see the light bulbs go off.”

Thousands of cheering spectators filled stands around the field, many dressed in costumes and school colours. I decided to drop in on Systemetric, the sole UK team at this regional heat. (Foreign teams attend a regional event of their choice.) Its members were from Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, which has regularly taken part in FIRST competitions since 2002. (It was also part of the winning alliance in 2004, although it could not afford to attend the championship that year.)

Systemetric was easy to locate in the crow­ded stands; its members were all dressed in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. As their physics teacher, David Massey, ex­plained, some 24 team members had made the trip, thanks to their sponsors Microsoft Research paying the $6000 entry fee and chip manufacturer ARM helping to pay for the students’ flights.

“It’s a shame there’s nothing like this in the UK,” Massey said. “It teaches the kids several things they can’t otherwise learn. This is the first time they build a large piece of machinery, for instance. It’s the first time they interact with adult mentors. It’s the first time they work in large teams. And it also gives them the chance to learn how to panic — how to go through a crisis without giving up. Where else can they learn that?”

The critical point

A few teams complained to me that the short timescale forced them to build the first thing that came to their minds, without having time to systematically review design possibilities. When I repeated this to Kamen, he laughed.

“You never have enough time or money,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen when you turn on the prototype, or what your competitors are doing. In six weeks the kids have to conceive, design, prototype, build, bust, rebuild and ship. FIRST provides a microcosm in which they can do this is an exciting and supportive climate.”

Alex’s team did not win in New York, but a victory at the Hartford regional heat sent them to the finals in Atlanta, where they came 14th out of 88 teams in their division. He and his team mates were disappointed that they had not been placed higher, but they have already started to build a chassis for next year’s robot. The homework will get done somehow.