Fun Follows Function
Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been. --Albert Einstein
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For Jason Turner, the creative flash came in a dream. It was contest day at Caltech with 1,100 screaming fans in Beckman Auditorium, cheering on the gladiators at their joysticks in a remote-controlled battle of the “ ‘bots.”
Turner was a contestant, but a disembodied one, watching the whole scene from above. His frustration grew as his opponents racked up points; he and his partner were scoreless. If only he could stop their robots, trip them up.
But what could he do? Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, his machine launched a plastic net that snared his opponents’ contraptions, halting them in their tracks. “That’s when I woke up,” the Caltech senior said. “I was so excited. I ran downstairs to my desk and started drawing sketches and diagrams so I wouldn’t forget.”
Then he looked at the clock. It was 3 a.m.
It’s a rare college class that taps into students’ dreams. Nightmares over test anxiety, perhaps. But rarely the creative stuff of dreams. Caltech’s Mechanical Engineering 72 is one of those unusual courses, and one that stirs the debate over whether creativity can be nurtured. It’s an all-absorbing class in engineering design for juniors and seniors who have longed to enroll since they first arrived as freshmen at this techie paradise in Pasadena.
During the first week of class, each student is given an identical bag of “junk”--gears, motors, ball bearings and tongue depressors, among other things--and a mere 10 weeks to assemble the pieces into a robotic machine that scores points by grabbing magnetic objects and affixing them to a metal wall. Students don’t have to use all their parts. But, more important, they cannot add any components to their junk piles.
At the end of the course, all of the robots are entered into a remote-controlled slugfest that fills Caltech’s largest auditorium and inspires a fervor that colleges usually reserve for football games.
The competition is one of the biggest things going at Caltech, one of the nation’s premier science and engineering schools. This year’s event, held last week, drew friends, colleagues, professors, prospective employers and family members from across the country.
No pressure, mind you. But the victors get to strut around like big men (or, increasingly, women) on campus.
“The thrill of victory,” says senior Steve Schell, is what motivates him to stay late into the evening practicing robotic maneuvers. Tory Sturgeon, a classmate with machine oil under her fingernails, stays even later: “The fear of public humiliation,” she said, “is very strong.”
The class does more than just summon an unusual level of motivation. It departs from the format used by 99% of classes in math, science and engineering: The professor lectures; the student scribbles. Students do homework, apply formulas and check their answers with those in the back of the book.
ME 72 lays out an open-ended question, with no one right answer, no obvious solution. Students wrestle with problems for weeks, brainstorm for hours on end, and then test their theories by spending 20, 30 or 40 hours a week in the machine shop cobbling together their contraption.
“We create an environment where students have to exercise their creativity to solve a problem,” said Erik Antonsson, a Caltech mechanical engineering professor who has taught the class for 16 years.
By developing these classes with “structured creativity,” Antonsson and a few peers around the country have launched a small movement in engineering circles and given a technological spin to age-old questions: Is creativity something you either have or don’t have? Can it be taught? And if so, what’s a good way to teach it?
The creativity-through-competition movement began in 1970 in an engineering design class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each student was given a “creativity kit,” a bag of bolts and other kitchen-drawer junk, and told to make something useful with it.
Students struggled with what to do. So Woodie C. Flowers, then a graduate student, proposed some structure: a simple contest, in which machines would compete in a sporting-style event. A tradition was born as Flowers became a professor and took over the class. His students, some of whom became professors themselves, spread the competition to Caltech, Georgia Tech and other top-flight science schools.
A decade ago, it trickled to the high school level through a Manchester, N.H.-based nonprofit called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). FIRST, for which Flowers serves as national advisor, expects 15,000 high school students to join about 500 teams that will compete in next year’s robotic competition. Each team competes in one of 13 regional tournaments in hopes of advancing to the finals at Disney World’s Epcot Center in Orlando.
Out to Change American Culture
With America facing a shortage of engineers and its youth registering notoriously lousy math and science scores, FIRST’s game plan is nothing short of changing American culture: coaxing kids to emulate scientists instead of rock stars or sports heroes. Competitions more closely resemble sporting events than science fairs. Contestants get on TV; they are greeted by cheering fans and adrenaline-pumping music. The regional event in Los Angeles will be held in the Sports Arena.
“We get what we celebrate in our culture,” said Bob Hammond, director of FIRST’s robotics competition. “If we celebrate people who dribble and shoot a basketball, then we will have a bunch of kids dribbling basketballs.”
Flowers, who remains the patron saint of the movement, steers clear of the argument over whether creativity can be taught. But he does know this: “You can create an environment so that students learn to trust their creativity, at least as much as they learn to trust calculus.”
Indeed, psychologists have some experimental evidence that creativity can be enhanced through training, especially by adopting an attitude of “playful exploration,” notes Dean K. Simonton, a UC Davis psychologist. “But there’s a limit on how far this can go. There’s certainly no way to intervene to make geniuses out of one’s students.”
Unfortunately, most technical education stifles creativity, engineering design instructors say. As a Stanford mechanical engineering professor since 1962, Bernard Roth has seen a steady arrival of bright-eyed students bursting with fresh ideas and graduate four years later as “dullards.” In the interim, their creative juices were wrung dry by years of regimented study of problems and solutions: “derive, prove and apply.”
The design class competition is the one time that budding engineers can take a risk and exercise their creativity without fear of flunking, losing their jobs or causing a workplace catastrophe. The tricky part is making students comfortable enough to take a flyer. Insecure or fearful people tense up, and work at all cost to avoid failure.
Antonsson gets his Caltech students to loosen up by instructing them to suspend their ideas for possible solutions and focus instead on the problems. That helps them avoid the classic mistake of most rookie inventors--getting married to their first idea and neglecting other possibilities.
Many of the world’s great thinkers have made breakthroughs after totally immersing themselves in a problem. They have a rich tradition of letting their unconscious do the work, the way that Jason Turner did in coming up with his secret weapon: the net to snare his opponents.
For Elias Howe, it was a dream that he had been captured by spear-carrying “savages” that led to the invention of the sewing machine. As their spears rose and fell, he noticed each had an eye-shaped hole in its tip. It struck him when he awoke: In a sewing machine, the eye of the needle must be at the tip.
In a way, Caltech’s engineering design class mirrors the movements of history’s great inventors. Students often lighten up their load of other classes, so they can become totally absorbed in brainstorming, testing, rebuilding and fine-tuning their contraptions.
They spend so many hours in the sub-basement machine shop in Spalding Laboratory that they sport a pasty complexion. To pull the students into the sunlight, Antonsson confiscates their machines over the four-day Thanksgiving holiday.
Senior Michael DeSalvo was one of those who nearly had to be pried out of the lab on Thanksgiving eve. “I guess it’s a needed break,” he said, shrugging as he reluctantly abandoned his workbench. “I’m learning that you cannot build a perfect machine.”
The Moment of Truth: It’s Showtime
The music pulsed through Beckman Auditorium as the seats quickly filled with more than 850 spectators. The overhead projector showed highlights of previous competitions, the techie equivalent of a sports highlights film.
A cluster of mechanical engineering students, or Mech Es, as they call themselves, were waiting just off stage. Each one tenderly cradled his or her precious robot--many of them squat, aluminum vehicles about the size of a pile of books.
Tory Sturgeon and her partner, Susan Sher, were in the dressing room, working furiously under vanity lights. Sturgeon reaffixed wires. Sher, her hands trembling, soldered an electrical connection.
As soon as Caltech’s glee club finished the national anthem, Antonsson breathed into the microphone: “Let the games begin.”
The first two-person teams gently placed their machines in the arena: a 4-foot by 16-foot plexiglass box with three levels connected by ramps. In past years, robots scored points by battling like sumo wrestlers, moving hockey pucks into goals or gathering pingpong balls. In the contest held last Thursday, the machines picked up magnetic objects from the bottom level and affixed them to scoring zones on the back wall.
This was also the first year that Caltech cut the umbilical power cords, forcing each machine to rely on batteries for juice and wireless transmitters for controls.
On one side of the arena, partners Jason Turner and Steve Schell set up their two symbiotic contraptions. Schell, who worked last summer on a hopping robot at the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designed his machine to jump up and attach itself to top bars. It then lowers a smaller vehicle on a wire to collect the objects and haul them into the scoring zone.
Turner’s was a defensive machine, ruggedly designed to leap off the top level, crash-land on the bottom and cause trouble for the opponents. At the last minute, he and Schell decided to scrap their secret weapon--the net--for fear that they would get snared in their own trap.
Their opponents were Dave Gagne and Howen Mak, whose machine boasted the toughest-talking bumper sticker of the event: “Time to Die, Nerd-Boy.”
The crowd let out a whoop when the 60-second round began. But nothing happened. Schell’s machine, which worked perfectly in practice, refused to jump. The others tried mightily to disentangle themselves, but barely budged.
Finally, Turner’s machine broke free, causing Schell’s more delicate robot to tumble from the top level and crash to the bottom. The audience gasped and groaned. No score for either side. A double loss.
Trouble plagued many of the teams in the round-robin tournament. Some rounds resembled a demolition derby as machines drove off the top shelf and crashed on each other, sending body parts flying. One wounded machine continued to drive around the bottom level, dragging its battery pack like disemboweled entrails. Initially, the students were stunned that the machines that worked so well in practice were plagued by Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
But it didn’t faze them for long. When their machines refused to perform, Sturgeon and another student began performing the can-can to entertain the audience while the clock wound down.
Andy Tretten, who had his machine bungee-jump using rubber bands and fishing line to cushion its fall, was frustrated at first when things didn’t go as planned. Soon he was leaping about the stage in a techie’s version of “Swan Lake.”
Antonsson, who emceed the event, looked the most disappointed. Perhaps he made the contest too difficult this year, he said. Or perhaps he was too ambitious by relying on wireless transmitters and receivers--which seemed prone to interference from cell phones in the crowd.
The audience, filled with fellow techies, was sympathetic and encouraging at any success. Schell’s machine functioned perfectly in one round, leaping up to the bars in one swift motion and quickly scoring points. The auditorium erupted in whistles, cheers and lengthy applause.
In the end, triumph came to the simplest, most straightforward designs. The steady robots built by Jason Wong and Alec Muller were the only ones that consistently racked up points. They easily won the competition.
Turner and Schell, with all their bells and whistles, came in second. Yet Turner, the productive dreamer, also claimed another special award. His classmates voted him “the student who spent the most time in the lab while asleep.”
