Eleven-year-old Tess Miller watches as a foot-long robot made of Legos glides along a track, knocks a miniature barrel on the gameboard and pushes it into a corner.

"It's pretty exciting, being able to actually accomplish something that's going to be in a big competition," said the fifth-grader at Word of God School in Swissvale.

She was among 300 middle-schoolers from 30 local schools who competed Sunday in the annual Lego League robotics contest. It is sponsored by the National Robotics Engineering Consortium, part of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.

On one level, this event is a game of toys. But the grander goal is to improve students' math and science skills and stimulate their interest in robots so that Pittsburgh develops a skilled workforce to become a robotics hub.

Students in the robot competition work in teams and solve problems, said Robin Shoop, who teaches robotics at Schenley High School in Oakland and also works for Carnegie Mellon University.

He said students also must manage their time, resources, learn about systems and access information.

"These are skills that companies demand of graduates," he said.

Sponsoring the contest are NASA, the Grable Foundation, the Heinz Endowments and AT&T. Students from Schenley's technological studies magnet serve as mentors for the middle schools.

Shoop said he likes the fact that most of his students are black and female - groups that are minorities in robotics.

Gathered around a computer Thursday at the consortium's site in Lawrenceville were students from the Clairton Education Center.

Cierra Mack, 11, of Clairton pointed at the computer and said, "I didn't know anything about robots before I did this. It's neat how we get to program them and test them and build them."

Her classmate, 12-year-old Terica Britt, said, "I like it sometimes because it makes my brain think real hard. When we go to college, we'll know how to do robots."

Students use between 200 and 400 Legos for their robots.

The youngsters write a program on the computer. A nearby infrared tower beams a signal to the robot, which contains a computer chip and two AA batteries. The robot moves on an 8-foot-square gameboard with the aid of two sensors that distinguish the light and dark areas on the track.

For yesterday's virtual game, students built robots designed to help a group of researchers studying climate change in the Arctic who were in danger of being trapped in a huge storm. The robots could perform as many as nine missions to save the scientists, their equipment and their data.

Al Dietrich, coach of the robotics team at Incarnation Academy on Observatory Hill, admires his students' enthusiasm on the project.

"They come to me to ask for the extra time after school to work on building the robot and programming the robot," he said.

Tori Yuhas, a parent and a coach of the Robotics Club at Riverview Junior-Senior High School, likes the contest's location at the consortium's building. She said students can rub shoulders with scientists from Carnegie Mellon.

"Kids think, `I can be a teacher, a doctor' ... whatever their parents are," she said. "But what kid ever thinks I can be a robotics engineer?

"I hope my kids realize that's an option."

Bill Zlatos can be reached at bzlatos@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7828.