Members of the Cimarron-Memorial High School robotics team demonstrate their entry in the FIRST Robotics Competition set for UNLV. Photos by K.M. Cannon. From left, Keaton Frerker, Ryan Wamble and Sara Salame handle the controls of the team's robot during a recent test run.

There's the Super Bowl, and then there's the "Super Bowl of Smarts."

That's the slogan inventor Dean Kamen came up with when he created a robotics contest for high school students called the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition.

In Las Vegas for the third straight year, the FRC Las Vegas Regional will take place today and Saturday at the Thomas & Mack Center. More than 50 high school teams from around the country, including 12 from Southern Nevada, will go robot to robot for the chance to advance to the national competition April 12-14 in Atlanta.

Local high school teams in the competition are two-time defending champion Cimarron-Memorial, Clark, Palo Verde, Coronado, Rancho, Basic, Del Sol, Legacy, Arbor View, Canyon Springs, Eldorado and Southern Nevada Vocational-Technical.

Last year, more than 1,125 teams competed in 33 regional events, with teams from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Hosted by UNLV's Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering, the competition requires each team to buy a kit of parts and create a robot, in six weeks' time, that can perform specific tasks during a game. This year's game, "Rack 'N Roll," is a contest to see which school can "rack" the most inflated colored tubes on pegs configured in rows and columns on a 10-foot-high center structure. Teams earn extra points for lifting a fellow robot 4 inches off the floor before the end of the 2-minute, 15-second match.

Parts cost $1,000, but teams can spend up to $3,500 more to bolster their robot's performance. An additional $5,000 is charged for an entry fee. NASA has supplied grant money for the first three years of the Las Vegas Regional; next year, fundraising will be the responsibility of each team.

Kamen's idea was to create a competition that would draw students into the field of technology. So far, at least in Southern Nevada, that seems to be working, says Eric Sandgren, dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas college of engineering.

"We see it as a great recruiting tool," Sandgren says, since the university gets approximately 1,500 students on campus for three days of competition. "We've gotten some good kids out of Arizona and California, and our image as a university has improved tremendously."

Each team includes a local mentor to help prepare for the competition. Often, UNLV faculty members work with the local teams.

"Rookie teams have not competed very well, but after a couple of years they move up," Sandgren says. "The first time through it's like being a freshman, you have to work your way up."

Cimarron-Memorial's winning team has 20 students working on prototypes long before the competition.

The team's co-adviser, Joe Barry, says the students spend up to 300 hours during the official six-week construction period working on the robot.

"The payoff is pretty big," Barry says. "We have had kids who used the competition on their resumes and got into their first choice of schools," including MIT and UC-Berkeley. "And it's turned kids on to engineering. A lot of girls and minorities have gotten involved, which is great."

According to Sandgren, "Cimarron has it down to a science. They work like clockwork. It's quite a tough thing for teams that haven't competed before," which this year includes Legacy and Vo-Tech.