Building Robots Builds Scientists

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The students finish their work and hook up the joysticks that control the robot's movement. Withers takes the robot for a spin. It rumbles quickly across the floor. "Very good," says school principal Dr. Gregory Hodge, who has entered the cafeteria with prospective students and their parents. Another student moves the robot's lifting mechanism up and down. But the air compressor that provides suction to grab onto the tubes is still not working well.

"They don't realize they are learning engineering," Hodge says later, out of their earshot. "We're kind of suckering them into it."

The Thrills of Competition

Fast-forward to Mar. 17, when the Harlem Knights and 52 other regional teams stream into the Javits Center for the New York-area showdown. The auditorium is split into a competitive arena and a pit area where teams tweak their robots between matches: Think World Wide Wrestling Federation meets NASCAR. The Knights prepare for their first match, scheduled for 10:37 a.m. They are grouped with a team from Bay Shore, N.Y., and a team from Newark, N.J., and face off against an alliance of three other teams. The Center buzzes with anticipation.

"Drivers, please come and claim your machines," bellows the announcer. Knights' member Tatiana Robinson, who has been picked to operate the lifting mechanism, carries the joysticks to the arena. Withers and a teammate haul the robot onto the playing field, slapping each other's hands like baseball players after a good play. The contestants line up behind the starting line. Marcus shakes his arms and slaps his thigh, burning some prematch jitters. As he hoped, he has been picked to drive the robot.

"Drivers, step forward, take control of your robots," the announcer says. And off they go. The piercing screams of hundreds of fans reverberate through the arena. The Gear Heads from Bay Shore quickly place a tube on the rack. The Harlem Knights robot tangles with SystemMetric, a robot from Great Britain. Then trouble strikes: The Knights' robot loses power after about 45 seconds. Withers and Robinson stand by helplessly, unable to do anything while other robots whirl around the floor, picking up tubes and placing them on the rack.

"It doesn't look like the Harlem Knights seem to be moving much," says the announcer. "I've just been informed that the Harlem Knights have lost power." The silver lining: Thanks to their teammates, the match ends in an 8 to 8 tie.

After the match, Horan and the Knights scramble to the pit, fix their machine, and get the power running. In the second match, the Knights stack a tube onto a rack, and prevail, 16 to 2. But later in the day, new problems with the suction device and lifting mechanism belie a serious engineering error. Other teams have built mechanical lifting mechanisms that more easily pick up the tubes.

At the end of day one, the Knights end up with two wins, two losses, and two ties. Not bad, but not good enough to place them among the top seeds. A teacher works late into the night in a last-ditch effort to improve the lifting gear, but he doesn't have enough time. The next day, the Knights win one match and lose another. They finish 23rd out of the 53 teams. "We were kind of disappointed we did not rank higher," Withers says. "In the past we ranked second and eighth." But thanks to their moxie and track record, and rules that allow for pairings in the competition's later stages, the Knights are picked by one of the top eight teams to compete in the regional finals.

Good Sports…and Future Mentors

In the finals, the Knights and their teammates lose the first two matches, and are eliminated from the competition. Thirteen other New York-area teams will head to the championship in Atlanta. There, featured speakers will include Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube, recently purchased by Google (GOOG), whose founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page headlined the last two years' finals.

The Knights, however, do not come away empty-handed: The team wins the Johnson & Johnson Sportsmanship Award. It makes Horan proud, and he tells the kids so. "The whole point of the competition is not just competing but also how you interact with other people," he says. "The hallmark is gracious professionalism, and not walking around beating your chest."

Meanwhile, Withers is preparing to enroll in the New York Institute of Technology in the fall. But he plans to come back and mentor a robotics team. "I am giving back to my community," he says. "I want to let the other students have as good a time as I did."

Click here to see a slide show of events from the New York regional competition.

Ante is the computers department editor for BusinessWeek.