Wired on Friday/Danny O'Brien: It's not your average high-school graduation. In the foothills of Silicon Valley, in a cool and quiet research facility, a clutch of American teenagers, most of whom have dyed hair, carry a giant wire-and-wood wedge above the heads of their schoolmates and nervous-looking elderly academics.

After a short introduction by their teacher, Mr Dunbar (who also appears to have a few pink tints to his otherwise conservative haircut), they make graduation speeches. The speeches are full of in-jokes about RPM, chain tensions and pitch diameters. One is a five minute, emotional tribute to a two-motor pneumatically shifting modular gearbox assemblies.

At the end, their student leader, Caroline Connelly, gracefully resigns her position to the next year's captain. She hands the new girl the ceremonial "Gunn Robotics Team Bag Of Love".

Behind them, one of their robots, a giant crab-like beast designed, constructed and machined by these teenagers in under six weeks, lifts its five-foot arms and wheels around of its own volition to ascend the wedge and tower above them all.

The Gunn High School Robotics Team (GRT) began life nine years ago as a small extra-curricular club founded by the school's engineering teacher, Bill Dunbar. At first, the roboteers were seen as a bit, well, weird.

Nowadays, they're the stars of Gunn. Students fight for the robotics group places as fiercely as they would the school football or athletic teams. Each year, a few young rookies from the school's lower years are accepted: over the next four years, they'll learn all the tricks of the robot-making trade from their older classmates - from designing with professional computer-aided design packages to learning how to use machine tools, to the nitty-gritty of constructing design prototypes and watching them fail.

GRT members drive each other hard, studying the equivalent of a 12-month course in engineering.

In their time at the club, they'll take part in short engineering challenges, like building a 15 ft working hamster-wheel or programming their first independent \bot. Eventually, if they're lucky, they'll have a chance to co-operate on building the team's robot entry for the FIRST nationwide competition - creating a self-powered, remotely controlled robot designed to achieve a specific task. (FIRST is Dean "Segway" Kamen's educational foundation, aimed at encouraging science and tech amongst schoolchildren in the US).

They have six weeks, and will live and breathe the robot's design until its completed.

The kids spend until midnight many nights in the GRT's home-made workshop. Tears are shed. Bots are built and destroyed. Somewhere along the line, they all die their hair red - Mr Dunbar included. It's a tight-knit group. For one segment of the competition, the robot has to behave "autonomously" - find and decide how to climb a ramp.

Gunn's team designed and implemented the software that gave the bot this brainpower - then provided it with a pneumatic sucker that allowed it to secure its place on the ramp.

In another phase, the robot switches to manual control, operated wirelessly by Kevin Jones, who gives the sponsors a demonstration of how he can operate the bots Y-shaped clamps to stack plastic crates higher than the bot itself, and taller than many of its creators.

The bot scoots and speeds across the stage at alarming speeds. Everyone in the audience flinches as it zips past them. Everyone except the wrapt redheads, who aren't bothered a bit.

Even compensating for the self-confidence of the average American high-school kid, these children are amazingly adept at what they do. As Mr Dunbar says: "This isn't your usual balsa-wood and duct tape project".

The bots use approaches that many graduate engineers haven't had a chance to absorb. And the kids have had this chance to learn in an environment that is tolerant of mistakes, and careful to support them. "It's okay to be wrong", says Ms Connelly, cheerily, "as long as you're not wrong all the time." That can be a valuable breathing space to some.

"Some of the folks that you see here", says Mr Dunbar, "are on the fringes academically. They're disconnected with the traditional school experience. Robotics competitions give these students experience and confidence. And the team gives those students a 'home'."

Robot building like this is a fast-growing arena in US education. There are 50 or so robotics teams in Silicon Valley, and some 800 compete in the FIRST competition. Some would say it's beginning to hold its place as a new school sport: with a powerful knock-on effect for the academic discipline of engineering.

But is it something that any school could achieve? Gunn is lucky - it's based in Palo Alto, one of the richest towns in a chain of affluence that still glows in the Valley. Many of the companies around Gunn - and the parents of the children who attend there - understand what Mr Dunbar is trying to achieve.

The researchers tonight are getting their show partly because they've lent the students use of their laser-cutting equipment. Others provide circuit-board fabrication facilities or engineering textbooks. And then there's the money. Merely entering FIRST costs $13,000 (€11,120). Mr Dunbar estimates that GRT spends around $90,000 a year on its work. He spends more time fundraising than on any other activity.

"Any school could do it, with the support of local industry," he says. "No school has that kind of money on its own."

Moneyed or not, Gunn's gearing up for a new year. The trainees will start learning to machine their own tools and parts. They'll spend time visiting primary schools in the area, and teaching 10 year olds the basics of the skills they're learning.

Then, in January, will come the announcement of the next FIRST challenge, and six sleepless weeks will begin.

As their introduction, this year's robot - due to be consigned to the GRTgraveyard and cannibalised for parts and ideas by future years - gives them a pull around the stage.

It's meant to be a demonstration of the powerful torque of the Ben's two-motor pneumatically shifting modular gearbox assembly. But to these new kids, it seems to be demonstrating rather more than just that. They're grinning and red-faced. At some point, their hair will surely follow.