Nearly 80 robots will descend upon Lindbergh High School Thursday for the annual battle of the student-made machines hosted by the Renton school: the NorthWest Regional Robotics Competition.

Seventy-eight robots from nine area schools will fight for first in Thursday’s all-day competition, called “Death Blocks.”

The task for these wood and metal machines? Picking up wood blocks and placing them in a plexiglas pyramid in the middle of a table. The team with the most points wins.

Each team receives the same robot-making materials every year, but how those materials are assembled is up to each team. The material kit contains plywood, sheet metal, angle iron and PVC, plus motors, gears, sprockets, chain and springs. “It’s always exciting to see what the students from the other schools come up with,” says Matt Randall, co-teacher of Lindbergh’s robotics class. Tim McElroy is the other teacher of the class.

Robotics is a fourth-year science class at Lindbergh and is taken by about a quarter of the senior class. The robotics competition is the final project for the class.

A group of parents and alumni who are engineers at Boeing, Microsoft and PACCAR design the competition each year. Students are given the same material kit but a different challenge each year.

This is the 16th or 17th year of the robotics competition, which was started in 1994 by the two founders of Lindbergh’s robotics program.

Lindbergh’s Team “GUN” finished first in last year’s robot battle.

Still, Randall said he has no idea how Lindbergh’s 18 or so teams will fare in this year’s “considerably-more-difficult” competition.

“I really can’t say,” he said. “We’ve done well in the past, but so have other schools.”