Picture a crowd of 40,000 teenagers screaming their brains out.

They’ve filled up a football stadium and are cheering for the on-field festivities.

Nope, not for football. Not even for a pop music concert.

It’s all for a world’s robotics championship, and London’s Raider Robotics — a team from Beal secondary school — took home an award for creativity at the showdown in St. Louis, Mo.

“It’s crazy. There’s over 600 teams, people from all over the world, people from Australia and China,” said Naomi Richards, a Grade 12 student on the team. “The competition is really great because these people are the best in the whole world, so their robots are going to be amazing . . . it’s neat to see their ideas and what they come up with.”

Richards is off to the University of British Colombia in the fall to study science.

The competition involved more than 18,000 students from around the globe squaring off in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) championships.

Students were tasked with creating a robot that could stack the most recycling bins on top of one another. A bonus challenge involved picking up a trash can filled with debris without spilling much of the waste.

Joey McCauley, 16, a Grade 10 Beal student, said being on the team as a computer programmer has made him want to go into engineering.

“As a second-year team, to get to the worlds it was pretty impressive. It was an honour and pretty impressive to see what teams can do and what high school students can do,” he said. “Some of the students who are doing this are going to be leaders and innovators in the science, technology engineering and mathematics field so it’s pretty lucky to be seeing this happening at this age.”

The Beal team is made up of 42 students who work with six teachers and four industry mentors.

The world championships included 900 teams from 40 countries.

kate.dubinski@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/KateatLFPress