More than 40,000 people from around the globe will descend on Cobo Center and Ford Field starting Wednesday for the FIRST Robotics World Championship.

Many of them will be top students, but no one will check your grade point average if you want to watch the fun.

The competition is space-themed, so robots must be capable of sealing a chamber with a hatch, inserting a large dodge ball into a cylinder and climbing a step 19 inches high.

Here's why it's important:

Skill Development

Robotics teams don't just learn engineering, coding and other science skills. They also learn business skills including marketing, fundraising, brainstorming and teamwork.

"Every team functions like a small business," said Gail Alpert, president of FIRST in Michigan, which is working to bring a robotics team to every high school in the state. "They're not just learning the STEM skills, they are learning the soft side."

Alpert said that robotics competition gives students a view of the competitive business world in which they'll be working someday and prepares them for it.

Talent pipeline

Employers are eager to hire people with skills in science, technology, engineering and math, known as STEM, and robotics incorporates all of those skills, said Gary Farina, executive director of the Michigan STEM Partnership, a nonprofit collaborative that includes educators, employers and policy-makers.

"The whole concept around FIRST, it has so many critical elements, it has the engagement to business and industry," Farina said. "It's all about connecting activities, with the critical talent needs.That's kind of the foundation of what STEM is about. The FIRST Robotics provide one of the excellent examples in the highest order in a sense."

Robotics has been around since the 1990s, long enough to have produced a lot of engineers, many of whom give back by helping teams of the next generation of robotics teams.

Michigan teams dominate at world robotics

Downtown hopping

More than 40,000 people are expected to attend the event this week, many of them from out of town and out of the country. Teams from as far away as Israel are scheduled to compete.

"The sheer number of people coming makes it a very significant event for metro Detroit," said Mike O'Callaghan, vice president and chief operating officer of the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau. "They are using hotels throughout Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, so it's good revenue."

O'Callaghan said the event also gives Detroit a chance to market itself to a rising generation of engineers and scientists from around the country who might consider moving here for work when they complete their educations.

The Downtown Detroit Partnership is hosting a series of interactive events at parks across downtown to capitalize on the event.

It's fun

The teams are competitive and eager to win, but the kids also have fun doing it, said Mark Hansen, an engineer at Ford who serves as the lead mentor for the team from Mercy High School in Farmington Hills.

"Every single bleacher will be full," Hansen said. "There will be breaks between the matches and they'll be playing music and dancing a bunch of dances I can't do."

Teams are encouraged to show off their robots and they question other teams during the breaks on how they solved a particular problem. Teams earn points for each of the tasks their robot completes and the team with the highest score wins.

"It's very similar to a sports match," Hansen said. "There's very much a sense of pride."

The competition concludes on Saturday when the champions will be announced.

Contact John Wisely: 313-222-6825 or jwisely@freepress.com. On Twitter at @jwisely