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NY Times-
April 18, 2002
High Schools Vie to Build a Robotic Champ
NEW HAVEN -- THE robot known as Rhode Warrior was due back on the playing field in less than 20 minutes, and the cramped pit area in which it was parked was a hive of urgent activity.
Students from Middletown High School in Middletown, R.I., clustered to discuss refinements in their strategy for the next match. In one corner, a student's mother worked on a sewing machine, mending one of the two conveyor belts that allow the Rhode Warrior, which looks like a rolling phone booth, to vacuum up soccer balls from the field. David Ferreira, a Middletown High alumnus who returns each year to assist the team, knelt to reattach a small aluminum plate that helps guide balls between the conveyor belts and into the robot.
"Repair? We don't believe in that word," Mr. Ferreira said, leaning out from behind the robot and breaking into a broad grin. "This is just tweaking."
Middletown High's Rhode Warrior was one of 63 machines that faced off here in early April at the New England regionals of the robotics competition known as First. The event in New Haven, which required teams of students to collaborate with professional engineers to build a robot using a standardized kit of parts, was a prelude to the national championships to be held April 25 to 27 in Orlando, Fla.
The First season (the acronym stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) runs from January through April. Nearly 650 high schools in the United States and Canada field teams of roughly 15 to 20 students. The program was started in 1992 by Dean Kamen, a National Medal of Technology winner and the inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, and Woodie Flowers, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their goal was to expose high school students to the joys of tackling technical challenges and encourage them to consider careers in science and engineering.
Mr. Kamen and Dr. Flowers have built First into the country's largest robotics competition: 16,000 people, including the spectators, typically attend the national championships, and each robot is plastered, Nascar-style, with the logos of sponsors like General Motors, NASA and Motorola. But First's organizers have suddenly found First overshadowed on the pop culture landscape by the television show "BattleBots," which pits two robot warriors against each other in a duel — and by the similarly combative high school robotics tournament that the show's creators started up last year with the help of some First veterans and a protégé of Dr. Flowers at M.I.T.
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