Inside Kent’s ShoWare Center, it’s a nerd’s paradise.

Hundreds of students gather around scores of tables, all loaded with machine parts for the robots built to take home the coveted Washington FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) title.

In the middle of the pits, a practice area allows the teams to finish fine tuning the 18-inch-by-18-inch robots, readying them to compete in Cascade Effect, this year’s challenge.

Wendy Liang, an 18-year-old Hazen senior and co-founder of Hazen 9693 Team Scarab, explained the rules.

“Each squad consists of a group of seventh to 12th graders,” she said. “The field is 15-foot by 15-foot, split in half with red and blue sides.”

On each side, an alliance of three teams operate their robots in cooperation with the others.

“There are three parts,” Liang said. “The first is autonomous for 30 seconds; the robots do what they’re programmed to.”

After the autonomous section, the teams take control by remote, operating their robots as they try to scoop up two different sized balls and put them into three different sized plastic tubes.

“Points are scored on not how many balls you have, but how high the balls are in the tubes,” Liang said.

The final 30-second section allows teams to score extra points by attempting to load balls into the center goal tubes, which are the highest in the field.

Also on hand at the competition is Auburn Mountainview’s Roarbotics Team 5953, headed by co-captains Jasper Lommen and Austin Kukay.

“FIRST is known as the sport for the mind, which is how the founder puts it,” Lommen said. “People can get together and build robots. There is a lot to it. There are business management skills, there are mechanical skills and there is a lot of teamwork skills you get.”

Lommen added that the robotics programs are currently the biggest program at Auburn Mountainview.

“It’s bigger than football, than basketball, than all that,” he said.

Auburn Mountainview has recently named the program an official sport at the school, hanging a banner in the gym alongside other more traditional sports.

At this past Saturday’s competition Roarbotics earned the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award and punched their ticket to the FTC West Super-Regional Championship, March 27-29 at the Oakland Convention Center in Oakland, Calif.

For Team Scarab from Hazen, the results weren’t as good, but that’s not why they here anyway.

“Our team just started this year, we’re a rookie team,” she said. “The last two years we were preparing for the competition with Labview and learning how to build with simple robots from the manual.”

“I do it because ever since I was really little I was interested in this STEM field in general,” she said. “In my sophomore year I took AP computer science, learned how to program and become very interested in computer programming.”

Liang said she hopes to build on the things learned with FIRST by majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.