On a recent sunny afternoon, balls could be heard clinking at Vashon High School as baseball players began practice for the spring season. Inside the school building, another group of boys was preparing for competition. But fielding balls for this team was a 3-foot-tall robot covered with wires, pulleys and blinking lights.

A group of nine teenage boys gathered around the robot as it maneuvered around a 12-by-12-foot ring, scooping up small plastic balls and depositing them into goals. Since this fall, the robot, which wears a slick gray armor during competition, has out-scooped and out-scored robots built by other high school teams throughout the state. Now the group — one of two robotics teams at VHS — is preparing for its most high-level competition ever. They’ll compete at the western regional competition of FIRST Robotics, a worldwide teen robotics organization, slated for March 27 to 29 in Oakland, California.

“They’re very pumped,” said the group’s volunteer coach, Bruce Johns. “This is a big deal because … they’ve gone up against some big schools. It’s a big opportunity.”

Those involved with the program say the team’s advancement to the FIRST Super-Regional Championships is evidence not only of the teens’ abilities in designing, creating and programming a robot from scratch, but of the fast success of Vashon’s robotics program, which now includes 50 students on six teams at the middle and high school.

“It’s evolving and growing,” said Kathy Jones, a parent and engineer who helps with the high school team. “We’re getting more and more attention and awareness from the community.”

Johns, a senior technician for Canon, started Vashon’s FIRST program in 2007 with a dozen middle schoolers who began competing using Lego robots.

At the time, Johns said, he wanted to volunteer at McMurray, where he had a child in middle school, and thought of the do-it-yourself soapbox cars that were popular when he was young.

“I was thinking in those terms, what would kids like to do these days,” he said. “I ran into FIRST, and I was hooked.”

The middle schoolers were hooked too, possibly because most already had hands-on experience with robots during Chautauqua Elementary’s popular fifth-grade robotics program. When club members graduated on to the high school, Johns said it made sense to take robotics there as well.

Both schools now have PTSA-sponsored robotics club that fall under the umbrella of FIRST, a well-respected organization that was founded in 1992 and whose name means For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. When school begins each September, FIRST — which now has over 38,700 teams in the U.S. and abroad — issues challenges for its middle and high school robot builders. Some years have seen machines collecting rings or flinging balls. This year, the robots must pick up small balls and deposit them into tube-like goals of varying heights.

“It’s like a sports game, except using robots instead of humans,” Johns said. “The game is released, and they imagine how they would play the game and translate that into what a robot might need.”

At the high school practice, the shiny, cube-like robot, controlled by students holding video game controllers, scooped up balls in a low tray and used a tall, deployable conveyor to lift the balls over 3 feet in the air, dropping them into the goals.

A couple students described how it took months of designing, trial and error to create the machine in front of them. The high school teams meet every Saturday during the school year to build their robots and practice with them. While adult volunteers guide the process and help obtain parts, they call the robots entirely student-made and programed.

“About halfway through we scrap everything and figure out something that works better,” said Ben Gallagher, one of the students.

And as if building robots isn’t tough enough, FIRST tacks on plenty of requirements — for example, the robots must work autonomously the first 30 seconds of the game — and tournaments are managed by nuanced rules and a complicated scoring system.

But what stands out most about FIRST competitions is that the teams partner up to compete with one another. So-called alliances must figure how to use each robot’s strengths to make goals and corroboratively score the most points against another alliance during a two-minute game.

“There’s a real emphasis on collaboration,” said VHS principal Danny Rock. “Even when you are competing against other teams, the rules and the goals are still based on the elements of cooperation.”

This season, Vashon’s two high schools teams, with separate robots, each won enough matches to advance to the state tournament in January, when 32 teams took over the floor of an arena in Kent. While both teams were out before the final rounds, in a complex set of circumstances, one of the Vashon teams was selected to be part of an alliance that went on to win the state title.

Since the big win, the boys say they’ve been working to further perfect their robot and practicing the game. At Super-Regionals they’ll go up against the top teams from the western United States.

“Everyone else is going to be improving their robots, and competition will be much more intense,” said Alden Rogers, a junior on the team.

During one such practice round the other day, their robot suddenly began smoking. Unfazed, the boys diagnosed the problem with help from Johns and determined the robot was building up too much static electricity. It wouldn’t be unusual for something like that to happen during competition, they noted, so they always bring spare parts. Other teams are typically quick to lend a hand as well.

“Everyone wants everyone to succeed,” said John Kehl, a sophomore on the team. “It’s about working together and getting along to achieve a goal.”

Asked why they spend their weekends building and working with robots, the boys don’t give the same answers that FIRST or the school district might — that it teaches important skills or promotes interest in science and technology.

“I think it’s really cool,” said Rogers. “There’s a lot of fun problem solving and challenges involved.”

Rock said that while some on the robotics team are involved in sports or other school programs, it also draws students who “aren’t necessarily involved with other types of high-profile activities.” The VHS program has grown from four students in 2009 to 20 this school year, including a few girls. There are 32 in the Lego robot program at the middle school, which has also sent teams to the state competition.

“Many of them would probably own the word nerd,” said Laura Bienen, Rogers’ mother. Her older son also went through the program, she said, and is now studying mechanical engineering in college.

“It’s incredibly valuable. It’s sports for the mind,” she said. “And it’s a team sport, so they learn the lessons of compromise and collaboration in the venue of a lot of difficulty.”

Later this month, the boys will put those lessons, and their robot, to the test when they compete amongst 72 teams from 12 states at Super-Regionals. The winners will advance to the world championships in St. Louis, Missouri.

Several of the boys said they expect to do well at the California competition— with one chiming in as long as the robot keeps working.

“It’s really rewarding to start the year with a pile of screws and things,” Kehl said, “and end with a machine that can do some pretty incredible things.”