It's Saturday afternoon, and students with the Farrington High school robotics team are hard at work.
Each team received a kit which included wheels, fasteners, wires and cables to build their robot.
"We also got something new this year we got the kinect for the xbox but what we're going to do with it is move the robot. If our robot's arm has to go up all we do hopefully is just put our arm up and the robot's arm will go up" says Travis Takashima, Farrington Robotics Coach.
This year's game is basketball.
Each team will need to build a robot that can hold three basketballs and shoot them on their own into a basket.
"The robot is going to be at the end approximately 38 x 28 by 60 inches so it's about as big as jorge over here," says Takashima.
Senior, Melanie Takashima who has been a part of the team for the past three years says the task may be difficult.
"We haven't really done shooting for the past 5 years we've been doing it so it's definitely a different element for us so we have a challenge to figure out how we're going to do the projectile and all that," says Melanie Takashima, Farrington high school senior.
Students not only learn about building and programming through robotics...but other skills too.
"The whole thing about these games is how can you be a good alliance by having good relationship with other teams," says Bebi Davis, Farrington Robotics Coach.
"I learned many different things from building robots to programming it to reaching out to different people, time management communication skills talking to others working with a team with others," says Melanie Takashima.
"Its not just competing with each other it's learning how to work with each other and help each other same time in a healthy way for students," says Davis.
Davis says many former team members have become interested in engineering because of robotics.
Some are in the College of Engineering at UH Manoa.
Many even come back every year to mentor and help the team they once were a members of before.
"It's fun it helps you as a person as well even though you do teach them even though you do teach the students the resources the skills become a better role model, leader," says Cristina Felicitas, UH Manoa freshman.
The students say they will spend about 400 hours building their robot.
The Hawaii regional competition will be in March.
