Like your average sporting event, the gym at Lindbergh High School was packed with competitors and spectators May 30 to watch the combatants square off against each other in an action-packed battle of speed, guile and strength.

But unlike the average sporting event at the gym, the combatants in question were not student athletes or teachers. Shoot, they weren’t even human; they were robots.

“The game is tic tac toe and there’s a little bit of a twist,” said Matt Randall, Lindbergh physics teacher and “head honcho” of the school’s FIRST robotics club.

This was the 20th year Lindbergh has hosted the Northwest Regional Robotics Competition and 45 teams of teenagers from five schools from around the area made the trek to Renton for the event.

The idea is simple: build a machine that can place wooden blocks into a tic tac toe board. Teams have 60 seconds and score points based on how many blocks they place, how high they place the blocks and if they make any tic tac toe rows.

Teams could also knock another team’s blocks out of the board or they could work together, using a special block, and each team could score points.

Randall said the competitors are simply presented with a problem – in this case tic tac toe – and given a box of parts to work with. Every team gets the same parts and Randall said the teachers don’t even know the best solution.

“They come up with their own designs,” Randall said of the teams. “Anyway they can make that work.”

The teams work on designing and engineering their robots, figuring out gear ratios, torque and then building the robots. Team members are required to take physics in order to join the robotics class.

There is no programming involved though, making it more of a mechanical engineering competition than actual Asimov- or even Roomba-style robots.

The teams used a variety of strategies to play the game, from scoops to pulleys to clamps.

Lindbergh team No. 6, “Los Bandoleros,” made up of senior Josh Kennedy, sophomore Miguel Mayorga and senior Miguel Sanchez, was the highest-scoring team of the day and finished in second place over all, falling – literally – to a team from Squalicum.

“The final match was epic, and ended when the robot from team from Lindbergh fell over backward after colliding with the tic-tac-toe scoring area,” Randall said in an email.

Los Bandoleros used a wide-scoop strategy for their robot. They would pick up three blocks at a time, lift them into place and slide them as a single row into the game board.

“The clamp os one-at-a-time and the goal is as many as possible,” explained Mayorga.

The strategy worked brilliantly in the opening rounds.

“We’ve been scoring like no other,” said Kennedy, who also competed last year when the game was placing rings on pegs.

Team Fat Puppies, consisting of senior Mitchell Hughey, junior Colton Maddy and senior Evan Lamb, went with a clamp concept for their robot.

Hughey said the team felt it would be easier to place the blocks in the board if they did not have a scoop, but the team did take a chance to admire the other robots in the competition.

“There’s a lot of interesting designs,” Lamb said.

Team Fat Puppies ultimately finished 13th overall.

A team with a robot by the name of “Termi Jr.” (like “Terminator,” the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie franchise about robots that become sentient and wage war with the humans) also went with a clamping design.

Seniors Meghan Hansen, Brianna Morgan and Elise Aylward said they spent a lot of time on strategy for their contests, but sacrificed being able to place blocks in the top row in favor of speed.

The girls said it was fun taking part in the competition, especially with robotics being a field that most people think of as male-dominated.

“Everybody talks trash to us,” Morgan said.

“But it makes it that much better when we succeed,” Alyward added with a laugh.

In the end, Termi Jr. landed the girls an eighth-place finish.

Other top Lindbergh teams were:

• Fifth Place: Dre Montgomery, Samantha Peltier, Jasmine Rau)

• 10th: Maria Cornell, Derrick Holt, Zane Vakerics

• 16th: Jessy Bickford, John Paul Garcia, Josh Jordan