With so much technology at our fingertips, the spelling bee might seem old-fashioned. But it’s alive and well, even in the age of autocorrect.

“You never know in life when it could be really important to spell. You could, like, win a whole trophy,” Sara Ibrahimi, 9, a fourth grader at Staten Island’s P.S. 68, said.

That is the goal for kids from across Staten Island this week, who converged in an auditorium over the course of two nights to show off their spelling skills, without the spellcheck technology many of us have come to rely on.

“I think it’s still important because even if you don’t have technology, you still have to spell properly,” Irene Feng, 10, a fifth grader at P.S. 58, said.

The students were competing in a borough-wide bee, in hopes of eventually making it all the way to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. They earned their spots here after performing well at their individual schools’ spelling bee.

The hardest word Sara had been asked to spell at her school?

“Incontrovertible,” she said, before spelling it correctly. “I never heard of it before.”

On stage, missing a single word leads to elimination. And sometimes, it’s the shorter words that prove harder.

For Sara, it was the word “cherished” that knocked her out, with the ring of a bell that indicates a speller was incorrect. For Irene, it was the word “homily.”

“You get to try your hardest and even if you don’t win, you tried, and that’s what you have to do,” Irene said.

Francesco Cerami decided to compete in the spelling bee after watching his sister do it.

“I’m trying to get like top ten, maybe,” Francesco, a 10-year-old fifth grader at P.S. 55, said.

He got pretty close, making it to one of the final rounds before getting tripped up by a tricky word: “trek.”

“I like spelling it, but some words are hard and it gets me a little bit frustrated,” he said.

He wasn’t alone. While there were moments of triumph, students on stage sometimes became frustrated or upset when they were eliminated. There were big smiles and some tears.

And in the end, one winner emerged from the high-stress contest, correctly spelling the word “carnivore.”

The top seven spellers from each night on Staten Island will move on to a regional bee, with a shot at making the citywide and national spelling bees.