Robot basketball? Robo-hockey? Sumo-wrestling sentinels?

"It's one of those events that's hard to describe without seeing it," Colorado FIRST Senior Mentor Dawn Lutz said about the robotics competition at the University of Denver's Magness Arena on March 31 and April 1.

Forty-eight teams from as far away as Kansas, Missouri, Idaho and North Dakota participated in the Colorado regional.

Teams built robots to score points by shooting balls though goals or by pushing their opponents to certain areas of the arena. That's the short of it.

The long of it is a rulebook about three inches thick, according to Lutz.

Teams of between five to 65 members are given a kit of parts, a rulebook and six weeks to create a 120-pound machine able to compete in the game.

Most of the teams are school-based, "because (building a robot) is a big undertaking" and the regional contest costs $6,000 to enter, Lutz said.Entrants also get help from engineering professionals.

"It's very unusual for high school kids to get to work with professionals," Lutz said.

The event was modeled after sporting competitions, but winning isn't everything.

There are two main themes at the "coopertition," a phrase coined by Dean Kamen, who founded FIRST and who Lutz lauds as the greatest American inventor, although she said his most famous product, the Segway scooter, is also his least useful.

The first theme is "gracious professionalism." Teams share resources, tips and even tools. "They compete hard, but we expect them to be professionals about it," Lutz said. Individual teams also join together in groups of three as red or blue teams for the actual game. The groups of three change, so teams play with and against each other during various rounds.

The second is safety. Everyone is required to wear safety goggles around the machines and Underwriters Lab Inc., a company that certifies product compliance (and is known for the UL stamp on light bulbs, among other products), provided a safety consultant for this year's event.

"Some of the teams that are big are run like small start-up companies," Lutz said.

That's the case for the Shazbots, a team affiliated with Monarch High School, but which also includes students from Broomfield High School, Standley Lake High School and home-schooled students.

The team had a project manager to oversee team captains in areas such as programming, electrics and fabrication, according to the Shazbots' faculty sponsor and Monarch teacher David Clark.

Monarch has a robotics class, but the Shazbots is "mostly an after-school club," according to Clark.

Caleb Cox, the Shazbots' programming and electric team leader, said he spent about four or five hours each day after school and six hours on Saturdays working on the project during the build season, which runs six weeks starting in late January.

Jill Gilliland, who helped organize the Faith Christian team, The Fuse, said, "it's intense; it goes from January 7 to February 21." During that time she estimates The Fuse, from Arvada, spent about six hours each week working on their robot for the first few weeks and 24 to 36 hours per week during the final push to finish on time.

Gilliland recalls one programming session that lasted until 5 a.m. and one session working on the mechanism that fires the ball that lasted until 2 a.m. "Those were sort of crunch time," she said.

"We pulled two or three all-nighters," Faith Christian team mentor Terriane Drake confirmed.

And although the team has help from engineering professionals, they try to keep the students "very active" in the build. "You don't want to do it for them," Monarch's Clark said.

"I wish I'd had this when I was in high school," said mentor David Larson, a mechanical engineer at Ball Aerospace. "It shows them what it's like to be a real engineer and whether they like it or not."

Larson designs aluminum and titanium housings for antennas for a living, but said creating a robot that throws balls though a goal is relevant to his field because it teaches the students problem solving by working within time constraints with a limited budget to create a machine to exact specifications.

The Faith Christian team built an exact replica of the playing field - even using the specified building materials - in a team member's garage and set it up and tore it down in the school's gym every day in order to test their designs.

The Ridge View Academy Rambotix, from Watkins, had to rebuild most of its robot in about six hours during the practice runs March 30 after it fell off of a transport vehicle and into the middle of the freeway on its way to be shipped to the competition.

"It was in pieces yesterday and now it's perfect," team member Jacob Davis said about the accident.

"A lot of the learning is dealing with the problems that come up," said the Shazbots' Clark.

But the project isn't all problem solving, computer programming and mechanics.

Sophomore Jenna Frazier, the Shazbots' project manager, gets to learn about all the aspects of the robot, but said "it's really not about the robot," as much as it's about the connections she makes with her teammates.

To see the final standings, visit www2.usfirst.org/2006comp/Events/CO/rankings.html.

To see a list of teams who won awards, visit www2.usfirst.org/2006comp/Events/CO/awards.html.

For more information about Colorado FIRST, visit www.coloradofirst.org.