Sometimes we need a motivational speech from Dean every now and then to keep things in perspective.
-erin
A Call to Action from Dean Kamen
BY KATHY KOWALENKO
From the Wright brothers to the importance of mentoring youngsters to the secrets of what makes a successful career, inventor Dean Kamen shared his thoughts with The Institute on a wide range of issues. Kamen, president of DEKA Research and Development, in Manchester, N.H., USA, is best known for his Segway Human Transporter, a two-wheeled rolling platform maneuvered by a standing driver.
We spoke to him in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta last April, where we were attending the national championship competition of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) [see âFired Up By Robotsâ], a competition for teams of robot designers. Some 7000 high school students from nearly 300 teams had designed and built the robots, which they brought to the finals in Atlanta. Kamen created FIRST in 1989 as a way to spark the interest of young people in science and technology.
A lot of the kids participating in FIRST consider you one of their heroes, but who is your engineering hero?
When I grew up, my heroes were scientists and physicists: Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Curie.
My interests span from aerospace to biomedicine, and because weâre celebrating the 100th anniversary of flight, I would say Orville and Wilbur Wright are among my heroes today, because they are at the other end of the spectrum from Galileo and Newton.
Orville and Wilbur Wright were âengineersâ engineers.â They took big, heavy cast-iron engines that put out a couple of dozen horsepower and said, âWe are going to fly.â To do that, you have to be an optimist, and have a broad base of technical knowledge. These guys had to understand engines, propellers, wings, airfoils, power dynamics, thrust, and control. Today you donât see many engineers saying, âI do power plants, as well as airfoils and structures.â
The whole field of engineering is so broad that it doesnât have an individual that stands out. I feel if I named one person as my hero I would discredit those in other fields.
What would you say to engineers to encourage them to participate in mentoring programs for kids?
There are two reasons for engineers to get involved. One is for their personal satisfaction. They simply will be enthralled. Engineers involved in the FIRST competition remember why they themselves became engineers. Itâs fun and exciting to do engineering projects this way. You get to build an entire project from beginning to end, and you get to be a mentor and a local hero. You also get to dig back and use all those tools in the dusty attic of your engineering background. Most engineers today in their real jobs are focused on long-term, serious projects.
The other reason is that itâs an engineerâs professional responsibility to give kids some sense of what the future can hold, and what they are missing if they dream their lives away about the world of entertainment or sports. By the age of 17 or 18, these kids will reach an unrecoverable state.
While the engineering profession has earned an A+ for contributing to society, we get a D for communicating to the public and in particular to kids about what is important.
Engineers keep the lights on, literally. We keep the water drinkable, the airplanes in the air and not crashing into each other. The world virtually would stop if all the engineers took a vacation on the same day. I think the engineering profession gets an A+ for creating a standard of living and allowing us to take for granted that the lights are on or the water is fine.
I think engineers have to be a voice to the next generation. They will never be as loud a voice as the world of entertainment or sports; entertainers are masters at it. Engineering will never be as loud a voice as the world of sports, but there needs to be a venue where engineers and scientists can show kids what an engineering career is all about. If professional engineers of the world arenât willing to tell them about engineering, who will?
How can a professional organization like the IEEE help?
I would give the IEEE an A+ for talking to, among, and between engineers about engineering issues. The IEEE gets a D for having the world understand what it does and how important and successful it is.
For example, when Hollywood gives out the Academy Awards, they invite more than just the people who make and produce the movies. Iâd argue that the Academy Awards program is nothing but a four-hour commercial that shows the world what the movie industry does and gets the world to support them. When sports teams induct people into their Halls of Fame, they care that the general public sees their ceremony.
When the IEEE has a big awards event, itâs extraordinary electrical engineers who are telling other extraordinary engineers what extraordinary work theyâve done. The public is unaware of their activities. As a consequence, our culture is dominated by nonsense that it is not sustainable. Where is the voice of the IEEE, the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), the NAS (National Academy of Sciences), and the NAE (National Academy of Engineers)? Where are the professionals who need to have some kind of context for the general public to be involved with and engaged in what they do?
That is a long way of saying the IEEE is a fantastic organization, itâs more important to the world than the National Basketball Association, but itâs less understood and less known, and shame on the IEEE and all the other professional societies for letting that happen.
Part of the FIRST program is teaching kids the soft skills like marketing and fundraising. How important are these skills for kids to learn?
One of the reasons that FIRST has grown so well and so fast is because every kid in a school can participate, from those who want to turn wrenches, write codes, or do the system analysis and coordination, to those who raise funds to get the team to the national event and decorate the machines.
We work to make FIRST a microcosm of the real world of product development. Every company that Iâve seen solve a project says, âWe donât have enough time or money, we donât know what the competition is doing, and we donât have enough resources but weâve got to get the product out.â
In six to eight weeks, these kids are getting a taste of the real world of engineering. They have constraints on resources, time, and budget. Theyâve got to organize themselves to build the entire system, ship it, and get it to work.
Do you fault the universities for not teaching the soft skills?
Universities decide on a set of skills to teach. They have too little time to teach students too many things, andâright or wrongâuniversities specialize.
FIRST is the core of real-world engineering. You either get that robot on the field to score or you donât. That is what makes the whole program unique. I think kids involved in FIRST who go on to universities have gained a much broader perspective on what engineering is all about. And they would never have gotten that perspective without FIRST.
This year, 23,000 high school students participated in the FIRST competition. Is FIRST meeting your expectations?
The event always exceeds my expectations, but I am saddened by the relatively low number of students participating. While everyone is astounded by our growthâweâre finally in a major national sports arenaâI assumed that we would have gotten here in the first or second year. Our growth may be envied but itâs never fast enough for me.
When will you consider FIRST to be really successful?
Five years from today, I want every kid in every high school in the United States to know that their high school has a football team, a marching band, and a FIRST teamâitâs a given, its part of the schoolâs culture. Until we make this kind of activity as attractive as football, the United States will continue to run the risk of a decline in technical talent that we canât afford.
And the IEEE should be part of a chorus of professional people who understand it is their obligation to get the word out to kids about what is important. Because our culture is full of nonsense, kids simply canât separate what is important from what is a distraction.
How were you inspired to get into high-tech?
I always liked solving problems. If I am going to take a lot out of this world, I thought I ought to put something back. The best way for me is to create things, which I think is the most exciting thing a person can do. Some people do it by having babies; I do it by trying to find solutions to problems that, if they work, will give people better lives.
I think inventing, creating, and solving problems are important. Most things you do as a pasttime should be kept in perspective. Kids in our country and our culture donât keep things in perspective. We have major national events for wardrobe malfunctions and shame on us. We get what we celebrate. Letâs celebrate the right things.
âŚI mean weak marketing campaigns).
I recently bought the original Iron Man comics. It sickened me as to how many times the word transistor was used. Transistor powered magnets, transistor powered skates, and even a transistor powered heart (read pacemaker). Then again it could have been because of the writing style of comics during that time. Personally then again there are times when I think that science is vastly undereported in this world. I was reading through my Almaanac and discovered that there were now five forms of matter. I wondered how did I miss that.
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