Kamen as Pied Piper for bright youngsters.
Jerry in Omaha
It’s the FIRST goal — to show science can be fun
By BENJAMIN KEPPLE -- Union Leader Staff
theunionleader.com
The organizers of the 11th annual FIRST Robotics Competition call their event an “engineering challenge” with good reason. It’s a challenge to take three boxes of parts and software and turn them into a 130-pound robot that is expected to perform complex tasks in competition with other robots.
But that’s just what about 700 adult volunteers were ready to do at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester yesterday. Whether from as near as Manchester or as far away as Brazil, all in attendance seemed excited about the prospect of taking on such a daunting task.
The competition brings together high school students, teachers, engineers, and other adult mentors to build a robot from the ground up. They have six weeks to do it. Then, in March and April, they’ll compete in one of 17 regional competitions around North America —and possibly FIRST’s national contest at the EPCOT Center in Florida. That will be held at the end of April.
“I’ve been fired up for the past week and a half,” said David Ferreira, a mechanical engineering student at Community College of Rhode Island from Newport, R.I. He went through the program as a high-schooler in 1996, and has now returned as an adult mentor for it.
“I absolutely love the FIRST program because it changed my life,” Ferreira said.
Ferreira wasn’t alone in his praise.
“I graduated in 1998, and I guess it’s what we call a FIRST-oholic,” said Shaun McNulty, an adult mentor from North Brunswick, N.J. “Even though I didn’t go into engineering, I got a lot of respect for engineering and what it does.”
The mission of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is to create that type of enthusiasm about the sciences and engineering. The organization, which Granite State inventor Dean Kamen founded in 1989, held its first contest with about 40 teams of high school students and adult volunteers.
This year, a record number of teams — about 670 — will take part. The program has grown so large that yesterday’s event was simulcast to eight locations across North America — where many high schools watched via satellite.
“We’re not building robots,” said Kamen. “We’re building opportunities and awareness and knowledge and partnerships.”
Kamen, the keynote speaker at the event, got an appreciative response from the crowd when he rode onto the stage in his latest invention: The Segway Human Transporter. He said the FIRST program would teach participants things they always would find useful.
“It’s a set of skills you can keep building on for the rest of your life,” Kamen said. “That’s why I believe everyone who participates in FIRST wins.”
Kamen thanked both individual volunteers and corporate sponsors of the event for their donations of time and money. Microsoft and Autodesk, software firms, both donated software. Freight transport firm Federal Express is shipping teams’ robots to competitions for free. The free shipping is worth about $1 million, Kamen said.
Woodie Flowers, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and FIRST’s national adviser, said he hoped FIRST would help science and engineering gain more acclaim in the public eye.
“Sports are wonderful but some perspective is appropriate,” he said, “and I hope FIRST is a vehicle for bringing that perspective.”
Professionals helping out the high school students said the program helps teach kids critical thinking skills, about dealing with problems and project management.
“It’s a great program to expose high school-level students to some of the real world,” said Archie Major, an engineer volunteering with students from the Goffstown Area High School.
So did college officials. Stephen Reno, chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire, said the system would study how FIRST has affected colleges and universities that have sponsored teams of high schools.
“If colleges and universities which aren’t currently sponsoring (teams) can see the benefit of working with FIRST, they can see how it is a vehicle for . . . encouraging young people to go into the fields of science, engineering and technology,” Reno said.
Reno said Rob Toutkoushian, the system’s director of policy research, would work on the study. No budget for it has yet been set. |
