Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and Zeroth Law from his 1950 novel "I, Robot" concern helping humans and not hurting them, but they do not cover robots playing basketball. To Megan Meehan, instrument systems engineer for the Advanced Topographical Laser Altimeter System at NASA Goddard, robots are all about "coopertition:" a cooperative robotic competition bound by the honor system.

Meehan has her own three laws of robotic competition: "You do your best, you do so honestly and you help your competitors do the same," said Meehan. In this year's competition, the robots will play a modified game of basketball.

Invited by her boss Fernando Pellerano, Megan is a technical mentor to a team of high school students who built a competition robot-named "Tormentum"-to compete in the For Inspiring and Recognizing Science and Technology national robotics competition.

Since early January 2014, she has devoted almost every free moment to helping the Space RAIDERs/Team 2537 from Atholton High School in Columbia, Md. The team has 70 kids, including Pellerano's son, and 20 mentors.

"I don't have kids for right now," said Meehan. "I just borrow other people's kids."

She has the technical expertise, having concentrated on space systems and robotics in college and for her master's degree. She also has the heart. Since high school, she has been deeply involved in volunteer work for the Challenger Learning Centers of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, a non-profit educational organization founded by families of the crew of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Robots are interesting because you can build something that can accomplish a task," said Meehan. "What's really cool is when you're able to apply the principles of robotics to accomplish tasks that are helpful to people, such as a robotic personal assistant to someone with disabilities."

The first Saturday of January, FIRST issues a challenge to high school students to build a robot able to accomplish specific tasks. Drawing elements from soccer and basketball, two teams of robots with three robots on each team were required to work together to move an exercise ball 24 inches in diameter across a 54-foot field and then toss the ball through a square goal to score. Each game lasted only 2 0.5 minutes.

The kicker: Students only had six weeks to build their robot. "Bag day," the day the rules state that all work must stop, was February 18.

Thanks to their fundraising efforts, Team 2537 had sufficient funds to build a backup robot. From bag day to the actual competition, the drivers practiced test runs with the backup robot. Twenty-four hours before the competition, students were permitted to make last-minute adjustments to the competition robot based on what they learned during testing of the backup robot. In the case of 2537, this meant tweaks to several pieces of hardware and software.

On competition weekend, March 28-30, fifty teams gathered for the Washington, D.C. regional competition at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Each team played ten randomly determined matches. When the initial team rankings were announced, Team 2537 was in the middle of the pack.

The top eight teams then each picked two other teams from the other teams to form an alliance of one, three-robot team. The sixth-ranked team picked Team 2537 for their alliance. That's when things got really exciting. Each alliance played the best out of three games.

"We swept our first two rounds and got into the event finals. We got silver medals for second place, our team's best finish ever. We narrowly missed the opportunity to head to the FIRST Championship. The finals were a clean, hard-fought match for both our opponents and fellow alliance members, and I couldn't be more proud of all involved," said Meehan.

Thanks again to their fundraising efforts, Team 2537 was able to compete at a second regional, the Chesapeake regional, on April 4-6, 2014 at the University of Maryland.

"Robotics gets me excited about engineering. The pure problem-solving aspect is the fun part. The students built their robots using good, old-fashioned garage experimentation. We got the kids to love the tinkering, the experimentation and the coopertition," said Meehan.