Elaine Owens could have been mistaken for a high school student as she walked around the Stan Sheriff Center yesterday wearing goggles and a backpack.

"Hopefully nothing breaks," the Hawaiian Electric Co. engineer said as she looked at robot parts scattered on the floor. "All we care about is nothing breaking."

Owens, a 2001 McKinley High School graduate and member of her school's inaugural robotics team in 2000, was at the 2008 FIRST in Hawai'i Regional Robotics Competition yesterday as a volunteer inspector and mentor for her alma mater's squad.

McKinley is one of 25 Hawai'i teams whose robots will compete against each other today and tomorrow for one of six spots in the FIRST National Championship in Atlanta next month.

The winning teams have been promised $10,000 each from sponsor BAE Systems to help cover the sizeable expenses of getting to the national contest, which includes a $5,000 registration fee.

For Owens, a distribution planner in Hawaii Electric's engineering department, serving as a mentor represents a chance to teach possible future engineers much-needed skills.

"When you're in the classroom, it's all textbook," she said. "With this program, you get to build robots. You get to apply what you learned in school to building something. It's very inspirational for the kids."

Being a part of the robotics team also strengthened her speaking and networking abilities, she said. She found an internship in college through a mentor from her high school team.

PROMOTES TECHNOLOGY

Holding the contest in Hawai'i for the first time is part of a workforce development pipeline that the state is trying to develop, said Art Kimura, program director of the Hawai'i Space Grant Consortium, who often is credited with introducing robotics to Hawai'i high schools.

"Certainly both locally and nationally, we need more students to become interested in technical careers," Kimura said. "We've seen data from across the world where countries are outpacing us in terms of producing more technically oriented people."

The state received a $1 million grant from NASA in 2007 to host a regional robotics competition this year and the next three years.

Teams from New Jersey, Florida and West Virginia are among the 37 high school teams who will pit their robots against each other in Hawai'i's regional competition.

Having the regional in Hawai'i "gives our students the chance showcase what they've learned in front of their family and friends. which has never happened before," Kimura said.

Thanks to the expanding robotics program, Hawai'i will be well-represented at the national competition next month. In the past month, four local teams — McKinley High School, Sacred Hearts Academy, Waiakea High School and Waialua High School — qualified for the competition at the Georgia Dome by earning high scores at regional competitions across the Mainland.

For twins Marissa and Christina Oba, 11th-graders at Sacred Hearts Academy, working on a robot has been a chance to learn skills they can apply in their everyday lives.

"You look at a Nintendo DS, you turn on the switch and you don't really think about what went into designing it," said Marissa, who wants to be an engineer.

During the competition, two three-team alliances compete against each other from opposite sides of a 54-inch by 27-inch track. The teams score points by pushing, carrying and lifting 40-inch inflated balls while racing around the track at high speeds.

"Our robot is geared to go 12 feet per second, and we're actually not one of the fastest," said Sharra Argo, 18, who arrived in Hawai'i this week with her teammates from Cocoa Beach High School in Florida.

They were all sporting hot pink T-shirts and hairdos to match their hot pink robot, Roccobot. The robot was equipped with a telescopic arm to lift the inflated balls over a 6 1/2-foot-high overpass to score extra points.

EXPANDING PROGRAM

NASA engineers from Kennedy Space Center mentor the Cocoa Beach team.

Argo, who heads the team's mechanical division, said she hopes to study medicine, but "my exposure to engineering through robotics has opened my eyes to a lot of other options, in case I change my mind."

Kimura said he hopes Hawai'i eventually will find the resources to expand the robotics program to all high schools in the Islands.

Studies have shown that getting students involved in robotics in high school can make them many more times likely to pursue careers as engineers or scientists, Kimura said.

"The evidence is absolutely compelling," he said. "It's not 6 percent more, it's six times more likely to do this, six times more likely to do that. It's very evident that this is something we need to do for our students."