Hundreds of students in SF for city’s first robotics battle

“It’s very exciting, and I’m really interested in robotics,” said Hayel Kiymetli, a gangly 14-year-old with her long dark hair pulled into braids. “I’m really happy to be here.”

Hayel Kiymetli traveled from her boarding school, Darussafaka in Istanbul, as one of hundreds of high school students taking part in a regional First Robotics Competition, which was held for the first time in San Francisco this weekend at St. Ignatius College Preparatory. For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology was founded in 1992 and is the world’s most prestigious organization of its kind. Winners from this weekend’s event, which continues Sunday, will go to the world final in Houston in April.

“In San Francisco, there’s a lot of technology,” said St. Ignatius science teacher Don Gamble, who helped bring the event to the school. “I thought this was one of the greatest ways and most fun ways to bring electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software engineering to the kids.” Last year, his school’s team went to the world final after winning the Rookie of the Year award.

The competition itself goes like this: Students from three teams are put together against another alliance of three teams, each team with a robot they have designed and built. The teams were told how the game would work in January, when they had six weeks to engineer the robots accordingly.

“This has been designed and built from scratch in six weeks,” said sophomore Emma Blenkinsop, showing off the robot for Lowell High School in San Francisco, where she is the elected vice president of PR and student-led fundraising for a 60-member team.

The theme this year is SteamWorks — standing for science, technology, engineering, arts and math. Human drivers remotely controlled their robots to zoom around the field to gain points by collecting yellow Wiffle balls (representing fuel) that they shot into a target (the steam boiler), as well as gears that they delivered to towers (the airship), where human pilots put them in place.

Each match is 2½ minutes long, so things moved quickly, with robots ramming each other like bumper cars while grabbing balls. During the last 30 seconds, the pilots lower ropes to pull the robots up onto the aircraft for an extra 50 points.

While the students mostly wore team T-shirts, some also donned steampunk glasses and top hats. Referees, mostly volunteers from Google and other tech companies, donned standard black-and-white ref shirts and shorts.

“We want to do for technology what the Olympic committee did for sports,” said First founder and CEO Dean Kamen, an inventor also responsible for the Segway scooter. But unlike the Olympics, Kamen said, “Every kid on every team can turn pro. There are millions of jobs for kids that can code.”

In the pit, where teams plot strategies and tune their robots between matches, Natalie Lunbeck, 17, of Convent High School in San Francisco represented the brand-new Missfits, an all-girls team with students from several schools.

“Everyone is welcome,” said the junior, who wants to learn programming. “In a lot of robotics teams, you have to work your way up. In your first year you don’t get to do anything” — not the case in the Missfits.

Members of team 254 from Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, which was backed by the NASA Ames Research Center, had the hushed concentration of a Formula One pit crew. Wearing matching blue jerseys, they were fine-tuning an LED light that they used with a smart phone camera to determine the best angle and speed to shoot balls from their robot to the target.

Captain Joel Bartlett, 17, said the team built two robots initially so they could continue to play with the design after their six-week initial build period was over. Teams like his and Lowell’s meet most weekends and evenings during competition season to work on their robots, with a minimum time requirement that most students far surpass.

“It’s fantastic,” said Muge Tuvay, science teacher and mentor for Kiymetli’s team, the Sultans of Turkey, who has seen her students understand that they need to work together and help each other to perform well. “They learn so much — more than just robots.”

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan