For the second year, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) will be hosting the FIRST Robotics Competition, where more than 40 teams of high school students will be competing against one another for more than $19 million in college scholarships and the championship trophy in what has been dubbed as a "varsity sport for the mind."

More than 2,000 high school students from New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are expected to arrive at UNH's Whittemore Center on March 21 and 22, where they will present their inventions built from a common kit of robotic components designed to compete with other teams' robots in a game called Recycle RushSM.

This year's FIRST, which stands "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," will see two teams of three robots compete against each other in completing several tasks, including stacking plastic storage totes on platforms, capping those stacks with recycling bins, then properly disposing of litter, which, in this case, will be represented by pool noodles.

Each team will be mentored by representatives from some of UNH's most prestigious robotics projects, including professionals working on the LunaCats Martian mining robots and ET NavSwarm, whose goal is to build a team of 15 to 25 robots that can communicate with each other while searching rugged terrain. Participants will also be given access to the equipment available at the university's College of Engineering and Physical Sciences for on-the-spot repairs.

"FIRST is more than robots. The robots are a vehicle for students to learn important life skills," says FIRST founder Dean Kamen. "Kids often come in not knowing what to expect - of the program nor of themselves. They leave, even after the first session, with a vision, with confidence, and with a sense that they can create their own future."

FIRST is not limited to New Hampshire and its neighboring states. Over in the land down under, high school students from all over Australia have their recycling robots on display at the indoor sports arena at Homebush on the western side of Sydney, where FIRST was introduced in 2006 by Mike Heimlich, an engineering professor at Macquaric University who moved from New Hampshire.

Heimlich says the competition proper started around eight weeks ago, when the teams were given the mechanics of the game and a short animation video and from there build their own robots in a very short span of 45 days.

"If you ask some of the sponsors here who do engineering, they'll tell you that to do a project from soup to nuts in 45 days is absolutely absurd," Heimlich says. "But here you have high school students doing it every year to a brand new challenge."

FIRST was established in 1989 to encourage high school students to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and to help young people develop knowledge, confidence, and life skills.