Robot games draw thousands of teenagers

[Joe Ross]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...ot-games_x.htm

By Elliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press
ATLANTA — Diablo whirs and rocks as it tries to climb a six-inch stair onto the platform to score the game-winning points. Purple balls bounce overhead, some bouncing off the machine as it struggles to wedge itself between the goal and a giant, yellow ball blocking its way.
Melissa Jensen-Morgan, a senior from Albany, Ore., works on her team's robot.
Gregory Smith, AP

Finally, the errant, yellow ball pops. Diablo is clumsily chucked onto the platform, where it extends its arm toward the 10-foot bar that will bring its team 50 points and certain victory — but it's too late.

The robot's team — the Red Devils of Rancocas Valley Regional High School in New Jersey — grimaces as the game-ending buzzer sounds.

One of Diablo's drivers releases the joystick in disgust. Even through the Plexiglas perimeters of the playing field, you can tell the team is disappointed that Diablo's opponent is already hanging from the bar.

Good thing Thursday was only practice.

About 7,000 high school students will butt brains Friday and Saturday at the Georgia Dome to see which of more than 300 student-designed robots will earn their teams a piece of the $4.5 million scholarship kitty.

The 13th annual Robotics Competition is sponsored by FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which inventor Dean Kamen said he founded as a way to promote careers that society often overlooks.

Kamen, who holds more than 150 patents and invented the Segway Human Transporter and the insulin pump for diabetics, said society puts premiums on occupations like basketball players and rock stars, when the real heroes are scientists and engineers.

"Kids want to do things they see adults doing and getting recognition for," he said. "We're taking the high school culture of sports and injecting into it something that has content."

To Kamen, it's about "developing the muscle that's hanging between your ears."

Those muscles were flexed Thursday for the competition's practice rounds, as high schoolers from across the nation tinkered with robots on pit row, then toted them on hand trucks to one of the five fields named for scientists like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.

It may be coincidence that the fields sit atop the same floor that hosts the SEC basketball championship, but the event is undoubtedly hoops-influenced. Remote-controlled robots scurry around the 48-foot field collecting 13-inch rubber balls and delivering them to human team members who shoot them into fixed and moveable goals.

The teams earn extra points by capping the goals with 30-inch balls or by making their robots hang from a 10-foot bar at center court. Because the teams start with the same essential materials, many of the robots appear similar, but they use a variety of methods to score points.

In the pits Thursday, Team WildStang was putting the final touches on its robot. The team, comprised of two suburban Chicago high schools, was one of last year's winners.

Tiffany Gach, 16, of Rolling Meadows High School said that when WildStang returned from last year's competition, it received a national-championship football team's welcome, complete with fans meeting them at the airport and banners draped across the school.

This year, she said, WildStang's robot is weak in ball-gathering prowess, but its goal-capping aptitude makes up for it. Gach and teammate Courtney Balcer said learning how to solve problems with robots has changed their views of science.

"I thought there was, like, no girls in engineering. I thought it was a man's job or something," Balcer said. "Engineering should be for, like, everyone."

Added Gach, "I definitely, after this, want to be an engineer."

A jaunt through the pits yielded several similar responses. Many students answered "engineer" to the cliche quandary, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Of a dozen who faced the question, mohawk-sporting David Freithe, 14, of Hope Chapel Academy in Hermosa Beach, Calif., was the only on who mentioned rock star and pro athlete among his aspirations. He said he preferred robots to playing guitar in his rock band back home, but to basketball? "I love basketball about the same," he said.

The prospect of funding future engineers is prompting several corporate sponsors to devote money and manpower to the competition, and they aren't shy about it.

WildStang is sponsored by Motorola, and four former WildStang members are now engineers for the telecommunications giant. Other sponsors include DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Lockheed-Martin and NASA.

Dave Lavery, NASA's program executive for solar system exploration, said the space administration is FIRST's biggest supporter, sponsoring 180 teams this year. Like the corporations, NASA has a self-serving interest.

"We're concerned about the supply of future engineers and scientists," said Lavery, who oversaw the Mars-rover project. "This is a wonderful way to fill the pipeline again from the bottom up."

Even if the competitors don't become engineers, the event still promotes a more productive and technically literate society, which "is good for the country as a whole," he said.

"They work side by side with engineers and watch them practice their craft, and they see if it's something they want to do," Lavery said. "Even if they walk away from science, they understand it."

Nice to see FIRST in the AP.