Waiakea High School's robot was doing well.

The clawed, four-wheeled contraption had just corralled three houses into safe territory yesterday when a volcano erupted nearby, sending round, fuzzy orange balls of lava flying into the air.

But the robot was prepared. With a paper "lava blocker," it successfully thwarted the eruption, securing its team the third-place spot.

The group from Waiakea was among 65 student teams from as far away as Poland competing this week in the 2007 International Botball Tournament at the Hawai'i Convention Center. Twenty of the teams are from Hawai'i.

Organizers said the competition is part of a state effort to emphasize "STEM" — science, technology, engineering and math — skills in Hawai'i schools.

"With botball, we're improving the pipeline into STEM careers," said Art Kimura, program director of the Hawai'i Space Grant Consortium. Kimura brought the first Botball program to Hawai'i five years ago.

"This is not only about robots, it's also about teamwork and problem-solving," he said.

Each team's robot had to pick up and deposit cocktail umbrellas and yellow, green and blue pom-poms — representing pineapples, plants and water — into colored bins while avoiding orange poms erupting from a volcano in the middle of the game board.

Waiakea's lava blocker was the brainchild of junior Kelson Lau. "I got the idea from looking at a lamp," he said.

"It was a good run for us, I'm very happy about that," said Jordan Olive, who will be a senior at Waiakea this fall.

To build the robots, each team started with the same kit: LEGO pieces, robot controllers, two handheld game consoles, processors and about 20 sensors, including color and touch sensors.

Elsewhere in the competition, team members from 'Iao School on Maui had their laptop out and were trying to figure out what went wrong in their round.

Their strategy was to collect the three white "houses" then grab the other balls. They had equipped their robot with a color sensor and programmed it to look around for its target.

Instead, the robot mistook the white PVC pipe for a house and moved toward it, crushing umbrellas in the process. Luckily for them, the volcano also malfunctioned.

Their score "wasn't what we were hoping for, but I'm glad we got points," said eighth-grader Kristi Kim.

The team from Poland was planning to rebuild one of its robots, which plunged off the table during the competition.

"Despite one robot's failure, we're proud of ourselves," said team member Jakub Oller, 18.

NASA was among the competition's sponsors.

"We want these kids to get Ph.D.s in robotics and come back to work for NASA," said Mark Leon, manager of NASA's Robotics Alliance Project, which brings students, engineers, private organizations and other government resources across the country together with the goal of increasing the nation's knowledge of robotics.

Recently, NASA has hired foreign nationals with robotics expertise because America is not producing enough professionals with that kind of knowledge, Leon said, adding: "We intend to change that."

He said the Hawai'i competition is "definitely on the high end for what we've seen in the nation in botball."