Robot Contest Teaches Nuts, Bolts of Science

How do you take a troubled kid from the inner city and turn him or her into a scientist or engineer?

According to former astronaut Andrew M. Allen, you give the youngster a technological challenge, demand the highest performance and prove that science can be as much fun as playing ball.

Allen, a veteran of three space flights, is president of a unique organization called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which each year brings thousands of young people into fierce competition to build the best robot. More than 12,000 youngsters competed this year, and Allen expects that number to rise to more than 30,000 this spring.

Given its rapid growth, the organization is becoming one of the nation’s leading weapons in the battle to get more youngsters interested in careers in science and engineering.

When he left the astronaut corps after more than 900 hours in space, Allen expected to join the aerospace industry, but then he “came upon the FIRST program,” and it changed his life. What sets it apart from other science education programs, he said, is it is almost entirely sponsored by corporate America, and it targets youngsters who are not necessarily interested in science.

“We’ve got kids who were in gangs, we’ve got kids who were on depression medication, kids from inner-city schools,” he said. These “at-risk” kids give the organization “the potential of getting the uninterested interested,” he added.

The concept is pretty basic. Participants are assigned to teams, sometimes numbering as many as 150, and each year they are given a problem to solve.

This year, the youngsters designed robots that played basketball and competed in sports-like tournaments across the country. The robots earned points by tossing a ball into baskets scattered around a court. Each year, the winning teams move on to the final competition at DisneyWorld in Orlando, Fla.

“Some kids join because of scientific interest, and they want to build a robot,” Allen said. “Some kids join because they want to do the public relations and the marketing. Some kids join because they want to do the graphic design. Some kids join just because they want to go to DisneyWorld.”

“I don’t really care what the lure is,” Allen said. “Once the kids get on a team, even if they have never been interested in science, they say, ‘Hey, this is neat, this is really cool. I can do this.’ The interest among the kids goes sky-high, especially among the girls. They see they can really do all the stuff the boys are doing.”

Paul Alliare, chairman and chief executive of Xerox Corp., and chairman of FIRST, said he knows of no other program that “has the potential to influence so many young minds while reinforcing the national goal of being a world leader in business and education.”

Allen said that nearly all the participants go on to college, and about three-fourths end up majoring in science or engineering. That’s why, he said, the program is sponsored by corporate America. “They are the biggest benefactors of it,” he said.

FIRST (https://www.usfirst.org) was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, a New Hampshire-based inventor and entrepreneur.

Major sponsors include Baxter International Inc., Chrysler Corp., General Motors Corp., Johnson & Johnson, Motorola Inc., Xerox, Boston Scientific and several philanthropic organizations and universities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration sponsors about 1,000 participants, and for the first time next year competitions will be held on the West Coast at NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Francisco.

Next year’s assignment will remain a secret until Jan. 9, Allen said, but it will involve robotics. After it is announced, participants will have six weeks to design, build and test their machines before the competition begins.

But according to Allen, the real winners will be the kids, not the robots. Allen says that many return to their schools with such high expectations that “a lot of schools have to revamp their science education programs to handle the demand.”

“It’s great stuff,” he said.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com.