FIRST builds the next generation

Friday’s launch of the last NASA space shuttle mission made me think of many things — not the least of which is just how much people of my generation were motivated by the space program to become engineers, scientists and astronaut-wannabees. (C’mon – it’s OK to admit it: many of us wanted to be astronauts.) We were glued to the TV, listening to Walter Cronkite (at least at my house) describe what we were supposed to see in the grainy pictures and explain trajectories and orbits with little plastic models. We paid attention to launch and landing schedules, tried Space Food Sticks and Tang because that’s what the astronauts ate, and drew dozens upon dozens of pictures of rockets, lunar landers and the moon. I built models out of LEGOS and made lunar landscapes out of blankets. Today’s kids don’t really have anything like that to spark their imaginations into science and engineering — but that may be changing.

One of the most motivating presentations made at PTC’s PlanetPTC user event a few weeks ago was made by Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor (now emeritus), who told us that 10% — yes,10% — of the entering freshman class participated in a FIRST competition. I don’t have any other demographic data on MIT’s entering class, but I would imagine that this level of concentration in any one attribute is very unusual. Dr. Flowers said that MIT has so many exceptional kids apply that selecting the few who can be admitted is not easy – they’re all straight-A students with high test scores. Kids who have come through FIRST have an advantage: they have proven that they can see something through to completion, have exhibited "gracious professionalism" (treating others with respect even in the heat of competition) and likely have poise and team skills far ahead of their peers.

Dr. Flowers first became famous back in the 1970s, when he took over a sophomore-level MIT class on 
design (known to MIT people as "2.70"). He would give students a bag of random parts such as small motors, wire and tongue depressors and a mission statement: make a device that could find a pingpong ball, pick it up and deposit it in a bowl. The "final" was a competition staged in one of MIT’s larger lecture halls (and eventually much bigger venues) that was an awful lot of fun to watch — and indeed, it was broadcast in the Boston area through the 80s and into the 90s.

In 1989 entrepreneur Dean Kamen wanted to bring this 2.70 philosophy to a new generation. He called the endeavor FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Today, FIRST has an impressive number of teams competing in 3 age brackets: FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST LEGO League and Junior FIRST LEGO League. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), is closest to 2.70 and is for hight school students. In 2011, according to usfirst.org, over 2000 teams made up of nearly 52,000 high school students participated. The FIRST Tech Challenge had 1,600 teams comprised of 16,000 high-school students (grades 9-12) build robots on a modular robotics platform. The FIRST LEGO League had over 171,000 kids (ages 9 to4 in the US and Canada and 9 to 16 elsewhere) on 17,000 teams build robots using LEGO MINDSTORMS technologies. Even more impressive, the Junior FIRST LEGO League had nearly 13,000 kids (ages 6 to 9) on 2,100 teams design and construct a model using LEGO bricks and moving parts — and present their research on a poster. I believe Dr. Flowers said that there were teams from across the US and Canada as well as Brazil, Israel, Korea, Mexico and 50 other countries.

That’s over 250,000 kids during the 2010-2011 school year alone who were involved in designing and building their solution to a particular problem. I’ve seen some of the results of their work: impressive. They aren’t stuck in “but it’s not meant to do that” or “I don’t know how” thought patterns, so their solutions are immensely creative and often not at all intuitive to an older brain.

One last thing: At the PTC event and then again at the Altair HyperWorks User Conference a week later, I met adults who mentor FIRST teams. I travel like crazy so am not a good candidate to mentor a specific team, but I’ve signed on to do video conferences with a team from Michigan. I can’t wait for Fall, when the team gets going again on its new mission, improving the quality of food by finding ways to prevent food contamination — with LEGO robots! What could be better?