Granted, college basketball stars galloping down the court get a tad more attention than high school robots rolling around, bumping into each other, and trying to toss inflatable life preservers onto poles. But eventually — who knows?

“In 30 years, you’ll see. This will be the sport,” master inventor Dean Kamen said yesterday at just such a competition at the Javits Center. Gazelles run faster, he said. Elephants make far heavier heavyweights. But only one species can work in a team to create a machine.

“This is the sport for humans,” Mr. Kamen said.

Naturally, Mr. Kamen has high hopes for this sport: He invented it. He also invented the Segway, the stent, and the first portable insulin pump. But cheering on these FIRST Robotics Competitions, as they are called, is his priority now, and it’s hard to imagine a higher calling. Not only does America need to nurture a new generation of engineers, but plenty of high school students need the nurturing only a robot — or a robotics team — can provide.

“My situation got messed up,” one of the competitors, 16-year-old Jonathan Alarcon, said yesterday. He joined Brooklyn’s George Westinghouse team his freshman year for one reason only: “My family was sent to a shelter and I didn’t really like it. So I would spend as much time away as I could.”

When he found out that the robotics team had a reputation for staying late (“When security leaves at 11, we leave,” another student, Jeremiah Pegues, explained. “If security stayed till 4 a.m., we’d be there till then.”), he signed right up. In fact, he said, “I forged my mother’s signature.”

Was she upset?

He smiled. “Now she’s very proud.”

Well, she should be. Last week, Westinghouse, a former vocational education school, came in second at the regional championships upstate. And last year the team even made it to the national championships, held in Atlanta.

This required some serious fundraising. “One student sold 4,000 candy bars,” the team’s coach, Nadav Zeimer, said. “He didn’t know he was a salesman.”

Neither did Mr. Zeimer. The week before the team had to plunk down its money or forfeit its place, he was at a wedding in San Francisco, worrying. The team was $7,000 short. “I was telling one of the guests about it, and he cut me a check on the spot.”

A new sponsor! This explains why the team’s shirts sport the logo for Tummy Tuck Jeans.

Yesterday, most of the team members were wearing anything but Tummy Tucks. Their jeans were beyond baggy, but their minds were sharply focused. One young man held a laptop computer near what looked like a shopping cart with a small crane attached: the robot.

The human was keyboarding frantically as another young man checked the battery. All around them, teams from another 36 schools, public and private, elite and ailing, were doing the same thing: preparing for the moment their robots would face their rivals in a two-minute, 15-second battle.

For the first 15 seconds, the robots are “autonomous” — that is, they must move on their own. After that they are in the hands of a human with a joy stick who must try to concentrate as fans scream and celebrate every lurch of the R2D2s below.

“Whose house? G-house! Whose house? G-house!”

Up in the stands, the Westinghouse fans began a roaring cheer for their team as the robot rolled out into the arena. Mothers beamed. Younger brothers and sisters waved pom-poms. The team’s mentors held their breath.

“We have a basketball team and other teams, but we are the glue that keeps the school together,” young Mr. Alarcon said.

“We’re the hot glue,” his team member, Akeem Cummings, said. Mr. Cummings admits he was getting into trouble before joining the team.

“People chant for us,” a third team member, Jeremy Joseph, said.

They sure do. That’s exactly what they were doing — wildly, deafeningly — as the team’s robot swung out its mechanical arm. Triumphantly, it lifted up a life preserver and proceeded to save about 15 young people’s lives.

By the way, it also proceeded to win, beating out Stuyvesant and the rest. But as Mr. Kamen likes to say about the robotics competition, everyone who gets involved wins.