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HOUGHTON - Three high school robotics teams showed off their finished products during a Keweenaw Economic Development Alliance meeting Wednesday morning.

The three teams - from Houghton, Chassell and Calumet - are part of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). The national organization was founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen in 1992 as a way to generate interest in pursuing technology careers among students.

The teams have six weeks to build a robot to perform in a game using a given set of parts.

Houghton and Hancock participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition. This year's game was "Lunacy," a contest honoring the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Teams used their robots to pick up spongy balls and place them in trailers attached to the other teams' robots. The field included "moon rocks" and "empty cells," both worth two points; the "empty cells" could be exchanged for "super cells," worth 15 points.

To approximate the difficulty of maneuvering in low gravity, both the playing field and the wheels of the robots were slick.

"You had to use these certain wheels, so the vehicle was skidding all over," said Travis Wakeham, a member of the Houghton team.

The Houghton team competed in the World Championships in Atlanta. Some of the competitors fielded 80-person teams aided by professional engineers or corporate sponsorships.

"For the resources we had this year, we did a really impressive job," he said.

Hurricane Hamilton, a member of the Calumet team, said while its mechanism for picking up balls wasn't as efficient as Houghton's, it was uniquely suited for accumulating "super cells." Those could only be played in the final 20 seconds of the two-minute rounds, but earned the Calumet team 30 points.

Calumet's team also benefited from the video-game playing experience of one of its players. The team reprogrammed a game pad console for the controls, adding lines of code to the controller to reduce its sensitivity.

The Calumet team was split into four sections: Fabricating, programming, electrical and business/marketing. The teams met at the beginning of the period to come up with a plan for the robot.

"We just sat down with a whiteboard and threw out ideas and tried to come up with something that would work," Hamilton said.

The Chassell team, now in its third year, competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge, a mid-level competition that offers a more accessible and affordable kit. This year's task was to design a robot that could pick up tennis balls and place them in a target at the center of the course.

"We're just getting going, but it's going good," said coach Michael Randell.

Garrett Neese can be reached at gneese @mininggazette.com.