Every year, 35,000 high-school students from around the United States participate in an engineering contest sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Gearing Up documents the four-month-long national competition, one in which students must combine quick wits, hard work and strategic thinking in order to succeed. Cameras follow each robotics team from the moment officials announce game details (a highly guarded secret) through a six-week "build" period and finally through the regional competitions. Along the way, team members and mentors narrate their personal stories, allowing viewers to share in their struggles, growth and progress towards their educational, personal and competition goals.

Demonstrating just what can happen when kids get turned on to science and math, Gearing Up, tracks four teams as they take on the challenge of a lifetime.  Each team helps raise the money for a robot kit, issued by FIRST.  Each kit has identical parts, but no real instructions. The idea is for each team to create a unique robot that is capable of performing the same, predetermined challenge in the games. Each team is also supported by teachers, fans, mentors, business people and community members who believe in the positive potential of young people. After that, the game is on, and each team touches us with the wonder and joy of what unfolds.

Gearing Up focuses on four teams heading for the regionals in the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition: Miss Daisy, a seasoned team from Ambler, Pennsylvania that designs its robot on a computer.  Robodoves, a small, all-girl rookie team from Baltimore; Rambotics, a team of teenaged felons incarcerated at the unique Ridge View correctional facility for boys in Watkins, Colorado; and Ratchet Rockers, a group of suburban kids from Wentzville, Missouri.

The robots are remotely operated, and the 2008 competition required them to zip around a small track maneuvering 40-inch, 10-pound balls that had to be lifted off, over and onto an elevated bridge. Gearing Up details the triumphs and disasters teams encounter as they share ideas, discuss their designs, and work out their technical challenges while racing to complete their robots in time for the competition. The Robodoves celebrate finishing their robot two weeks early. The Rambotics get a slow start complicated by three students who escape from school. Students on the Ratchet Rockers express doubts that their robot will even work, while the Miss Daisy team contends with a robot that must lose 5 pounds overnight to meet eligibility requirements.

At the regional competitions in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Denver and Annapolis, the teams get a first look at the designs and solutions of other students, including a fearsome group of robots capable of flinging the huge balls to the other side of the playing arena. They also get a taste of the real world as they struggle for the competitive edge with no money, no time and no resources. Through round after round, the Robodoves, Miss Daisy, Rambotics and Ratchet Rockers contend with broken wheels, welds and electronics; illegal bumpers; stripped gears; reckless navigating and robots that simply fall over.  And round after round, the teams find the support they need from their mentors.

Whatever a team’s outcome, for each student, the experience is uniformly good. “I won in my heart,” states one student. “If I didn’t have robotics, I would be a dull person.” says another. But the adult mentor of the Robodoves, Ron Karpinski, sums it up: “What we do here is not magic, but it’s magical.”