An intense undersea robotics competition.

So frustrating.

Budding engineers on the eight-person King Magikarps crew of the Harrison Middle School's Seabots underwater robot team thought they had considered everything in designing their underwater robot entered in Saturday's SeaPerch competition at Rowan University.

They didn't expect an underwater referee's legs to get in the way, kicking up turbulence, and they didn't expect to score so low - 14 out of 24 points.

"Bad things will always come your way," said Andrew McCorkle, team manager, slumping his shoulders after their robot's turn under the water.

And so do good things, because, in the end, even the problems in the pool didn't keep the Mount Laurel crew from winning first place overall in the middle school division.

More than 350 middle and high school students, most of them from New Jersey, vied Saturday in an intense underwater robot competition, testing capacities for flexibility, speed, navigation, engineering, and creativity,

Next Saturday and Sunday, hundreds more from Pennsylvania schools will compete at the 10th Annual Greater Philadelphia SeaPerch Challenge at Drexel University.

Both events are part of the national SeaPerch program, sponsored by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research, which culminates in a national competition next month in Massachusetts.

The Magikarps will be there, as will the Upper Salford community team, the Istiophorus Platyterus (Sailfish) team from Montgomery County, which traveled to New Jersey to compete.

"We're always promoting STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math]," said Navy representative Haidy Oliveira, a mechanical engineer running the event at Rowan.

"We're getting the students involved in a very hands-on activity. They are learning about soldering, wiring. They are learning how remotes work. There are lessons on buoyancy."

The idea is that each crew (some schools have multiple crews in competition - Harrington has six) represents a manufacturer of remotely operated vehicles seeking to land a contract with the Navy.

The Navy lists the specs and provides a starter kit of plastic PVC piping and other components, but it's up to crews to not only make it work, but to improve it through modifications.

Using a remote-control device, crew members had to steer the robots under water through a series of five hula hoop-sized plastic circles, set at various angles, some perpendicular to the pool bottom, some on a slant. Assuming the robot passed through all five, speed determined the winner.

Next came the "finesse" challenge, requiring a manipulator arm attached to the pipe frame. The arm had to poke five sponges through five holes so each would bob to the surface. It had to lift a peg out of one hole and put it in another - with the most points awarded for the peg going into the hole with the smallest diameter. The arm also had to slide a bracket along a pipe, placing it in the exact right spot.

But there was more than mechanics. Just like in the real business world, technical expertise is only part of landing the job. McCorkle's Magikarps had to convince a panel of student engineers from Rowan - part of a group of 110 Rowan student volunteers - that their crew had the expertise, the teamwork, and the best solution to the Navy's problem.

To do that, they documented their progress and research in a notebook and posted results on a poster board display. "We came in Tuesdays and Mondays and Wednesdays and every day possible," Ethan Stillman told the judges. "Sometimes over the weekend."

They told the judges about design challenges and what went wrong - and how they fixed them.

They described how they added a longer manipulator arm to modify the standard - a shoebox-sized frame of plastic pipe supporting three pill-bottle-shaped motors and propellers. They also changed the design of sponges arranged to keep the robot at the perfect buoyancy.

One team member, Dan Lam, found free online computer-assisted design software to help with the process.

Team members Vincent Cariello, Edward Rodefeld, Tyler Johnson, Edward Bennett, and Colin O'Malley also talked to the judges.

At first, the seventh graders were a little stiff, despite their obvious knowledge. But when the Rowan engineers started asking questions, the age difference dropped and the conversation could have been heard among colleagues in any engineering office, anywhere.

The judges noticed it, too.

"We were all equals and this was an engineering problem," said judge Max Bareiss, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering. He said the seventh graders' work was top-notch, close to what he had seen in his college classrooms.

To be sure, there were problems. On Friday night, less than 24 hours before the competition, the Magikarps rebuilt all three motors. On Saturday morning, walking into Rowan's gym, a crew member accidentally dropped the control box, breaking it. Luckily there was a spare.

The seventh graders had aced countless practice drills at a local swim club and at their school in Mount Laurel, where their prizewinning science teacher, Maureen Barrett, has a 12-by-8-foot tank in her classroom.

But when they arrived poolside, they learned another engineering lesson: Any good plan can, and often does, go awry.

The robot from the school competing in the next lane got tangled in one of the obstacles and as an underwater referee tried to free it, "he was creating a ton of ripples, distorting our view," McCorkle explained.

By the end of the day, teacher Barrett was elated and exhausted. Of the six teams her school fielded, five earned awards, with the Magikarps heading to the nationals. They prevailed, because, despite the problems in the water, their presentations brought up their total score. They weren't the best in anything, but they were good enough in everything to win.

"I really believe hard work pays off," Barrett said, "and these students worked their tails off."