High school teams battled on Lindbergh High’s basketball court and fans crowded the bleachers at the Renton school last Thursday. But the day’s sporting event also had some unusual elements, like soldering guns, safety glasses and … robots.

Lots of robots.

Nearly 80 small wood and metal machines from nine Western Washington high schools fought at Lindbergh Thursday, during the annual NorthWest Regional Robotics Competition.

This was the 17th year that Lindbergh has hosted the robot rampage. But this year may have been the best competition yet, says Tim McElroy, co-teacher of Lindbergh’s robotics class. He and fellow robotics teacher Matt Randall helped put on this year’s robotics competition: “Death Blocks.”

“Oh my goodness, it was head and shoulders above last year,” McElroy says of last Thursday’s event. “It was a very good competition, a very hard competition, a very challenging competition.”

During the one-minute matches, each team used hand-held controls to make its 12-inch tall robot pick up wood blocks and place them in a nearly 19-inch-tall plexiglas pyramid in the middle of a table. The team with the most points at the minute’s end won.

The competition was a double-elimination tournament that resulted in a final four playoff.

Lindbergh’s SATU team won the whole thing but not before several nail-biting matches.

“They won in a very, very exciting competition,” McElroy said. “The other team performed extremely well.”

That other team was second-place Pusillanimous from Kentridge.

The battles took place on four tables on the roped-off basketball courts. Signs on the tables said what teams were on now, on-deck and in the hole, and table assignments were also boomed over a microphone. Four students kept time and adults wearing JUDGE shirts policed the action.

Many competitors wore black shirts that read “Death Blocks 2009 Robotics Competition.” All wore safety glasses and white name tags inked with their school’s initials.

Teammates and competitors crowded the tables and Lindbergh fans filled the bleachers.

Sophomore David Wheeler was one of those fans.

“I’m just here to watch the creations,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

Each team created its robot using a kit containing plywood, sheet metal, angle iron and PVC, plus motors, gears, sprockets, chain and springs. How to make a robot out of these materials was up to each team.

The material kit stays the same for each year’s robotics competition, but the challenge changes. Each year’s task is designed by Renton School District’s Robotics Advisory Committee — a group of parents and district alumni who now work at companies like Boeing, Microsoft and PACCAR.

This is the 16th or 17th year of the robotics competition, which was started in 1994 by Larry Richter and Geoff Newing, the two founders of Lindbergh’s robotics program. Richter was watching last Thursday’s contest.

The NorthWest Regional Robotics Competition is the final project for Lindbergh’s robotics students. Robotics is a fourth-year science class taken by about a quarter of Lindbergh’s senior class.

It’s a fun class, but harder than it seems, says Scott Morrison, one-third of the Lindbergh robotics team named Where is Jomar? The team was named for Morrison’s teammate Jomar, or Joseph Franco, who was absent for about three weeks.

“I used to love Legos,” Morrison said. “I thought this class would be like Legos, basically like man toys. But it was a lot harder.”

Where is Jomar? didn’t make it to the final four, but Morrison was still proud of his team’s “mediocre robot.”

“It took us a long time to build this and I’m proud of it,” he said.

McElroy is proud of all of Lindbergh’s teams and happy that they were given an opportunity to flex their athletic muscles against teams from other districts.

“I’m looking forward now to next year when we will do it all over again,” he said. “I don’t know what (the challenge) is though, because we haven’t invented it yet.”