Woodie Flowers MIT Interview (2010)

FIRST General Forum
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I’ve been watching this on a loop for about a week now and as a mentor it’s been helping me rethink how I want to structure our team, how we do “training” as well as just creative exercises in general

If you haven’t seen it before it’s a really fantastic interview and you will learn a lot about his philosophy, mindset and also his work outside of FIRST. It’s about 2 hours but honestly it should be a video teams watch as a group during lunch on a weekend meeting or something. There are so many good ideas here and 15k views means clearly not enough people in FRC have seen it.

Some of my favorites:

“It’s don’t think it’s really teaching, i think it’s helping other people learn. The saying that your teaching implies a push and I think a pull is a better way to think about it”

"While you’re a student you have a safe opportunity to learn about your ability to be creative. People have often asked me do you think you can teach creativity, I don’t wanna be part of that debate and I don’t care what the answer to that question is. I do firmly believe that you can create an environment in which people can learn about their own creativity and you can certainly teach people to double or triple the amount of creative ideas they can have in a short time. So you can get people out of the ‘you must find the answer’ into the ‘let’s think about lots of ways to do this and whittle it down’ "

“I think we miss some fantastic opportunities because we still have a minimum level of grades. I still in fact remember in faculty meetings we have the impression that our grades are accurate. I don’t think they really are, they are probably a good measure of a particular activity. But I think the MIT system does really pretty well and one of the things in a very careful study, that just finished in just the last year. We know that 10% of the MIT freshman class are first alumni. So they have been involved as high school students in this robotics Competition which is very much like 2.70 on steroids and they’ve done hands on stuff. They’ve worked in teams, they’ve been entrepreneurial, etc. And MIT has been paying attention and that’s good news”

Feel free to point out your favorite quotes and moments. The bit about a moonshining hillbilly hotrod and helping his friends elope is pretty good! Miss this man!

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Haven’t watched the whole thing yet but it does remind me how lucky I am to have experienced “2.70 on steroids” in the mid-00s.

Thanks again Woodie.

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Found another one I had never seen before.

He did a Tedx talk!

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Great find. Woodie on game design:

When we first started doing this, faculty at other schools would ask about it. Quite often, people would say “you know, I had this great idea, and I don’t know whether it’s possible, but I gave it to the students as a creative exercise.” That’s pedagogically criminal. Why would you ever do that? You have a very small chance at making sure people regard themselves as creative, and you’re going to potentially give them something that can’t be done!? So we would try very hard to fashion competitions in which you would never sort the class into “was able to” and “not able to”. You always wanted gradations of success. In an ideal world, everyone was able to do it, some better than others. You also want to make very sure there’s not one killer way to do it that’s horrendously complex, because if everybody recognizes that and they try to make this really complex thing and it doesn’t work, that’s not good for them either. … You’d try to make the tradeoffs very subtle and difficult. I actually tried to make sure that the competition was not fair, because if you set out to say “this is a fair competition, we’re going to find out who is best,” that’s not the right environment for a creative exercise. So there was always lots of places for egos to hide: “Yeah, did okay, but I happened to run up against the guy who had X, and it was alright.”

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That’s a fantastic one! I liked how the first year they did the challenge he spent time the night before really working on a design to make sure it was even possible and since he ran it at the end of the event it failed. The ramp (much like this year’s charging stations) was not in prime condition like when he tested it originally. It failed immediately and was an even better lesson for the students. Even the best of us forget to think about “sand on the ramp”

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