The Competitive Robotics Club’s third annual Robot Rumble held Sunday saw interest and participation from Sacramento State students, local high school students and even 5-year-olds.

“Our son is very interested in building robots. He’s been interested in how things are made and seeing how they work. He’s loved robots ever since he watched Wall-E. We knew he’d be interested so that’s why we brought him,” Theresa Drum said about her 5-year-old son.

While some of the robots were pitted against each other, the event was more of a demonstration than a competition.

Members of the Competitive Robotics Club gathered about eight 1-pound robots that took turns in the mini-arena set up in the University Union Ballroom.

The club members spent most of their time at a table crowded with wires and scrap pieces of metal, where they fixed damaged robots while the participants took over the remote controls.

Robert Mair, president of the Competitive Robotics Club, said the event gave the kids a chance to get excited about science and engineering.

The club members said building robots could be fun for anybody.

“We have a lot of non-engineering students in the club too &- a history major, a psychology major- and people who just think robots are cool, and this gives them an outlet and funding and experience to just play around with cool robots,” Mair said.

One of whom was graduate student Robert Davis.

“I’m in graduate school for psychology which is really boring. I wish I did mechanical engineering because I’d actually be doing stuff like this,” Davis said.

Davis decided to participate in the club because he has always been interested in assembling parts and creating new things.

“When I was a kid I always built stuff out of legos and would rip apart radios just to see how they worked. I was always interested in mechanical things, building my own little projects,” Davis said.

For this event, Davis has created a robot that he named the Death Bringer.

He said he spent about eight hours building the robot, complete with a hooded skull, red lights for the eyes and a remote-controlled scythe as a weapon.

The design of the robots was not very restricted; the only real guidelines were that they should not weigh more than 1 pound, and should not have weapons that would potentially immobilize other robots.

Other robots at the event were named Cheddar, which was wedge-shaped, and La Cucaracha, which had an exterior similar to that of a cockroach.

“There’s a lot of creativity involved in these robots; everyone has a different robot design,” Mair said. “My favorite part about the event is seeing the bots that we’ve worked hard on actually getting into the arena zipping around, banging into each other, bouncing each other off the walls; it’s pretty cool.”

Cayla Gales at [email protected].