In a humble, crowded garage in Waikele, independent student robotics teams are practicing for a massive international competition — and contributing to a quiet uprising.

On a recent day, the “garage team” of 11-year-old Julia Reilly and 12-year-old Abbie Tadaki were expertly running trials with a remote-controlled robot they built to compete in May at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas, the largest robot competition in the world.

The two barely blink when they are reminded that they are in the still-small but growing number of girls in the male-dominated field of robotics, that they are among the handful of garage teams taking a tougher path by working without school support, and that there is some pressure to uphold Hawaii’s exceptional track record in national and international competition against hundreds of other teams that are equally hungry to come back after COVID-19 pandemic interruptions.

The slogan on their team shirts trumpets this team’s determination: “Girls can change the world. Hawaii Girl Power.”

Working in robotics has taught them that “girls can do as much or more things that boys can do,” Abbie says matter-of-factly. “We can achieve the same things.”

They are among the 32 Hawaii teams that have qualified for the championship being conducted in phases May 3 to 12 at Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center.

The field at this prestigious student robotics tournament is daunting: In 2018 the VEX “Worlds” set a record for the world’s largest robot competition, with 30,000 participants in 1,075 teams from the U.S., Canada, China and the United Kingdom. When the tournament was forced to go virtual in pandemic 2021, it still set another record, for the largest online robot championship, with 12,693 participants.

HAWAII HISTORICALLY has done well in the annual competition, and at one time was ranked fifth in the world in participation per capita, says Adria Fung, K-12 robotics engineering education specialist with the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium at the University of Hawaii.

Six local garage teams, which are not sponsored by a school, qualified through earlier competition to go to Dallas: two teams with Island Robotics from Waipahu — Hawaii Girl Power and the all-boys team WALL-E; Mililani Mechs Robotics; Musubi Robotics from Waianae; and two teams from Pukalani STEM Imagineers Robotics in Kula, Maui.

The Hawaii school-affiliated teams that also qualified for the VEX championship are from Mililani Mauka Elementary School, Nanakuli High &Intermediate School, Sacred Hearts Academy, Wai‘anae Intermediate School, Waiakea Intermediate School on Hawaii island; two teams apiece from Haleiwa Elementary School, Highlands Intermediate School, Kaʻohao Public Charter School and Kapolei Middle School; three teams each from Pearl City High School, Waialua High &Intermediate School and Saint Louis School; and four teams from Manoa Elementary School.

Fung is heartened to see so many local groups qualifying for the world championship at a time when robotics programs everywhere have declined. “We’re way down. Because of COVID, we lost a lot of teams,” she said.

Hawaii had about 260 VEX robotics teams at their prepandemic height; now there are about 120, Fung said. Robotics programs have suffered as some schools have dropped extracurricular and after-school activities during the pandemic, and some overtaxed teachers have opted out, she said. Those losses have spurred a modest uptick in garage teams, made of students who want to pursue robotics even without school backing.

THIS YEAR will be the first time since the pandemic began that the VEX world championship is resuming in-person competition before live audiences.

Building back robotics programs is crucial for multiple reasons, Fung said. Robotics serves as a pipeline for the next generation of workers in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And at the unfortunate point around middle school when girls start to believe they are not good in those subjects and fall behind, robotics can provide an engaging bridge.

The U.S. can ill afford such a gender divide. Women make up half of the U.S. college- educated workforce now but still hold only a quarter of the science and engineering jobs, and nearly 2.5 million STEM positions nationwide are unfilled, according to the nonprofit Robotics Education &Competition Foundation, which presents the VEX Robotics Competition.

Garage robotics teams face an extra layer of challenges in that they must operate without the bigger facilities, and added teachers and advisers, that a school can provide.

Schools also often cover the $1,200-per-team entry fee for the VEX championship, and some help with airfare. Garage teams must find their own resources and fund their own participation. At last check on Saturday, team WALL-E was a little over halfway to its $8,000 goal on GoFundMe; Hawaii Girl Power had raised just over one-third of its $9,650 goal.

Still, participants agree that the learning potential is priceless.

To prepare for the VEX IQ Challenge known as “Pitching In,” for example, Hawaii Girl Power has been deep in the engineering design process for nearly 10 months, constantly testing and modifying to help their robot perform better. They’ve done at least 10 major rebuilds.

At the championship, the two girls will have just one minute to take turns steering the robot around a corral to pick up 22 foam balls and deposit them in a floor-level goal, or a high goal, which counts for more points. The robot must end the game suspended from a hanging bar — the higher, the better.

Right now, the girls’ robot has no problem gobbling up the balls with a rolling cylinder of suspended rubber bands and unloading the payload into the low goal, but they are hurriedly working to add a catapult that can reach the high goal.

Still, crafting and programming a skilled robot is not enough to capture the top awards, as teams must also present a well-written, detailed log of their work, and impress the judges during an interview.

Abbie’s mother, Kim Tadaki, says the long trial-and-error process has tested the girls. “They would get mad at each other. But they learned you have to get along and not fight with each other,” she said. “The whole design process is not, ‘Bam, you got it, problem solved.’ It really teaches them perseverance and teamwork and communication.”

Fung says the magic of robotics comes when the students combine those social and communication skills together with “all those concepts from all their classes — math, English, social studies, science — and they’re putting them into this one interdisciplinary project. They don’t even realize they’re using English to document in their notebook, and social studies to research their robots. …

“They are simulating what an industry professional would do in the real world.”

A STEM activity such as robotics “is pretty much a tool to develop the next workforce, the technical workforce,” she added. “I think that’s the whole goal of education nowadays: to train the students so that they have the skills and they’re equipped for jobs we don’t know exist yet.”

The members of Hawaii Girl Power think they already know what some of those jobs could look like: Abbie dreams of a career as a veterinarian who works with robots that can diagnose injuries and illnesses in animals. Julia wants to be a nurse who works alongside robots that do the same for humans.

Predicts Julia: “The world will be full of robots when we grow up.”