The Competitive Robotics Club at Sacramento State brought video games to life at the Robot Rumble on Sunday.

The Robot Rumble is the sister event to The Smackdown in Sactown event the club puts on every February.

“The club supplies all of the parts, including circuit boards, which aren’t cheap,” Bryant Ho, the club’s treasurer said. “They probably covered about $3,000 worth of stuff. This semester one of my robots has tin cans and bike spokes on it, which I got myself.”

Club members can spend between three and 24 hours building their robots for the event, Ho said.

This semester’s Rumble presented a fully-recycled robot, hover craft and computer-controlled robot. The technology for the computer-controlled robot can be attached to any form of computer, controller or light switch.

“The great thing about engineering is you can tear things apart to find out how they work, and then you’re able to come up with something like my computer robot,” Steven Brimer, a computer engineering major said.

The Competitive Robotics Club meets Tuesday and Thursdays in Santa Clara Hall, and is open to all students.

“We’re trying to promote more interest in math and science in the community,” Ho said. “It’s open to everyone. We have psychology and history majors in the club as well as engineering.”

Club members were willing to share their creations with the public while educating visitors who have come from all over California.

“We let the public drive the robots and sometimes they can control them better than we can,” Brimer said. “We just want more community awareness because some people don’t know they like it until they’ve come to an event.”

The students took time between battles to continue building more robots in front of the visitors and explain why engineering is important.

“Everything around you not found in nature is a physical manifestation of someone’s idea,” said Daniel Fraga, a mechanical engineering major.

The robot fights usually take place on the floor for everyone to see, but there is also a plexiglass box for the more violent fights in which robots are destroyed or flipped over.

“At Robot Rumble we just run them and fight until the batteries die, but the Smackdown in Sactown has some gnarly fights where robot parts are flying in the air,” Ho said.

Ivy McDonald can be reached at [email protected]