May 27, 2010 • 19 mins
In this episode, Robert and Allison take a road trip to the Georgia Dome, where they grab an exclusive look at the FIRST Robotics competition. Tune in and learn more about the world's largest grade-school robotics competition.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison Madamel, the science editor how stuff Works
dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science rider how
stuff Works dot Com. And this episode we finally took
(00:24):
Stuff from the Science Lab on the road, although not
very far down the road, yeah, not not too bad
to the Georgia Dome for the first championship held April
fifteen through April seventeen, and we got up close in
personal with robots and their young masters. Yeah. It's it's
pretty cool, um just to I guess set the scene
for everybody. Uh again, this is the Georgia Dome. This
(00:46):
is where they play football hockey like football football. Yeah
you like I said that that's kind of the Southern
accent football, right I think. So, Yeah, this is the
first time, like we both of us went to it
last year for the blocks, so this was this was
the first time that I've been back to the Georgia Dome.
I'm just not a sports guy. Uh. So you have
(01:07):
this big you know sports uh auditorium type deal, right,
and it's just but just just loaded with nerds. And
I mean that in the most complimentary, uh fashion possible,
Like these are just awesome nerdiness going on in this
this building. UM and of course chaperone's um, adult volunteers, UM.
(01:29):
Then and then then kids dressed up as their mascots.
It's amazing. Yeah, there are a lot of mohawks going on.
I actually I'm a big fan of the mohawks, so
that's that's always nice to see some mohawks. And they're
pumping music like all sorts of like high energy you know,
kind of kind of beats going on, and it looks
like everybody was on some sort of sugar um, you know,
(01:49):
just in a lot of audio visual stuff, like there's
something with like when we first got there, uh, the
rock was on this big screen talking about NASA. UM.
I didn't know what that was about. But so while
we were at the First Championship, we actually took the
opportunity to interview the president of First, a gentleman named
President Paul Godonus. Let's let Paul explain what FIRST is
(02:11):
for those of you guys not familiar with it, Well,
FIRST stands for for Inspiration and Recognition as science and technology.
It's the world's largest robotics competition for grade school and
high school students that we started about twenty years ago
by inventor Dean Kaman seen invented the segue. He recently
a robotic prosthetic arm. He has four hundred patents for
(02:33):
a lot of medical devices, and he got this started
with twenty eight high school teams mentored by some local
companies UH twenty years ago and this year we have
nineteen thousand teams from grade school through high school around
the world participating in our robotics competitions. Blake Paul said.
High school teams have traveled from all around the world
to compete in the championships this weekend. Did you know what
(02:54):
what I'm talking about? That one team from the Middle East?
I think it was a combination Israeli UM like Palestinian
collaboration or something. Yeah. So you can see all these
teams cloud in their team shirts and their get ups,
and there's an awards for imagery I think, so that
kind of explained some of the crazy costumes. And then
there was like one team that was just a bunch
of robots and they were they had a human child
(03:15):
that they were forcing to compete in the really yeah,
and everybody's wheeling their robots and trolleys to and fab
It's it's pretty cool. Well, hey, let's hear from some
of the mini teams that were competing. We're Team thirteen
seventy nine, the Gear Devils from North across Georgia and
right now we're working on fixing our kicker. Oh. We've
been competing for like about eight years and we come
(03:39):
to Georgia Dome pretty much every other year. Yeah, they
had that awesome Masca at the Blue Devil. I think
we'll get a shot of him on the blog if
we can which one vil. He's the devil who's blue. Okay,
let's hear from another team. So we're from San Diego, California.
We're a rookie team from Canyon Crest Academy High scho Yeah.
(04:00):
I love these guys. The aluminum nar walls and they
had to the narwhale helmets on, Like these helmets with
these big um it's not a tusk because it wouldn't
our walls have I guess it's a tusk unicorn horn
tip deal coming out of their heads and you know, yeah,
they're a little bit too cool for school. Initially, Remember
we had to chase them yeah. Yeah, and then they
finally rallied together and shout at their team name into
(04:22):
the microphone at the end. Yeah, and they had to
get a little bit organized the the that's some of
the teams were a little faster on the rally. So yeah,
the vibe at first I touched on this earlier, but
but it's just it's just awesome because these these kids
are running around and just enthusiastic about science and about robotics. Um,
the parents and the volunteers, the chaperones, everybody's just like
(04:44):
really gung ho um, and and the nerdiness is like
right out in the open. Uh, like just unabashed nerdiness
and geekiness and just just a love of science. And
it's just you know, it's in the air. It's it's infectious. Really.
I mean, you just you want to go home and
hug your room, but give little games to play in
the living room, that's right, that's right. Yeah, And with
(05:06):
that vibe, you kind of get excited about the future
of robotics here in the United States and globally, right, Yeah,
that's what it's all about. Yeah. So here's First President
Paul Gadonis again talking about how some of the high
schoolers involved in First Fair Leader in Life, for example,
they're fift more likely to go on to college after
they graduate high school. We have twelve million dollars of
scholarships open to them to enable them to go on
(05:26):
to college. And there are three or four times as
likely to study engineering or science than their peers who
weren't on a team. And it's not a different group
of students. We just had the exposure of being on
a first team. And we've got ninety thousand wonderful volunteers,
often professional engineers from companies like Cisco and Google and
Boeing and IBM and so on, and NASA who inspire
(05:49):
these kids, do you ask? Of course, has had a
lot of problems getting kids interested in science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics, and now we collectively knew these areas of
interest a stem right, and the US has launched initiatives
like this sum Education Coalition, which is co chaired by
folks such as the American Chemical Society and the National
Science Teachers Association to change that scenario. So here's Paul
(06:10):
talking about why he thinks the US has been struggling
with the issue. Well, things have changed. Well since when
I was growing up in the sixties. Uh, it was
the space race. It felt like a patriotic duty to
study math and science to get to the moon first.
But today our media tells young people that the way
to fame and fortune is to bounce the ball or
try to send your way into a Hollywood stage, instead
(06:31):
of using your brain to do something useful for our society.
And so that's what we're trying to show, that it's
cool to be smart. So I'm pretty sure that my
high school did not have a robotics team. How about yours?
We didn't. Yeah, would you have joined if they were? In?
Um see, I don't know, because my my initial reaction
would be, like, you know, thinking back to myself in
(06:53):
high school, I probably would be a little intimidated. I mean,
I wasn't I wasn't that much of a science dork
at the time. You're more of an English doork, right, Yeah,
I'm just a dork in general, I guess. But but yeah,
and I would have probably thought, hey, I don't really
know how robots work, and you know, and and this
was you know, this was olden days when they weren't
in our living rooms eating dust, so um so yeah,
(07:15):
I would have been a little intimidated. But but having
gone to the event, I know that it's more of
a team type deals and it's not like, you know,
they say, all right, welcome to the team, go build
a robot they can shoot a basketball. And now it's
not quite like that. It's it's hey, we're working together,
et cetera. Right, So, about ten percent of US high
schools now have a first robotics team, but a lot don't.
Here's Paul and my More high schools don't have robotics teams. Well,
(07:37):
it's a good question them, after all, they all have
a varsity basketball team or varsity football team. I think
part of it is just learning that first robotics is
out there, you know. So we are expanding the number
of teams. We're calling on schools, encouraging principles and teachers
to support a team. We're finding more corporate sponsors, companies
(07:58):
like Boeing and be A systems in Google who will
help fund teams. So I think primarily it's getting the
word out so that when we go into a high school,
we find that uh, kids sign up when they hear
about it because they think it's cool, or even if
they don't know about what it is. They get they
get started, um and boom they say, hey, this is
a lot of fun. And there is also the issue
of teacher pay with First right, our teachers getting paid
(08:22):
for their efforts. Let's hear from Paul on that to
the teacher, I mean, I'd like to see the teachers
get rewarded for doing this, uh financially, just like the
English teacher who runs the drama club or play or
the football coach after school. Uh. So we encourage that
among our school teams. But it's not as their teachers
(08:43):
are the only adults involved. There are thousands of volunteers
helping out, and a lot of them have related expertise
that they're more than willing to share. Right. We talked
to one of those volunteers, the kilt guy. It was
technically what a utility kilt until a kilt I think
they call them? Yeah, pretty cool. We talked to him
about his volunteering with First and because Robert said, guy
(09:05):
wearing a killer is bound to give some good quotes. Um, yeah,
this is a This is a U tailor kilt company
based in Seattle, a modernary reinterpretation of the kilt very comfortable.
I'm a great supporter of unbifurcated freedom. UM quick shout out,
I hope they give you a free one. UM. Yeah.
So I got involved in First a couple of years ago.
My my son was going to high school in Bridgewater, Massachusetts,
(09:29):
which had a team called Team at eight T J Squared,
which one of the first I don't think they were
in the first year of First, but they think they
joined him like the second year. It's a very old
veteran team. UM. And he he sort of had some
interest in robotics and dragged me along to one of
the meetings. And I'm a I'm a research engineer, electronics
engineer by training, so I got involved. They needed some
(09:50):
help with programming electronics. I got involved initially with the team,
and I thought I'd give a little bit back by
volunteering this year. UM. So we're running the practice field
where teams can but basically try out things they can't
really try on the field or they need to work
on the field. So teams are trying out the autonomous mode,
(10:11):
which is the first fifteen seconds of automatic operation. UM.
So that typically they need to do some tuning. They
might have several ideas, they want to make sure they
get the timing rights, etcetera. Um, and then some other
teams are trying out modifications and just trying some ideas
or different drive approaches, which again it's in a they
have a bit more time here and people aren't trying
(10:31):
to ram into you and everything, so it's an opportunity
to to practice and to sort of, you know, get
a get a bit more experienced before you go out
into the scary stuff on the main field. I'm a
great supporter of unbifurcated food and that that was my
best line from the whole first interview, and it didn't
even come I'm sorry from you, Paul, that it came
from this volunteer. Go was awesome. Yeah, yeah, he u
(10:51):
he was. He was quite a character and it was
very enthusiastic about the whole of that. So you're probably wanting,
how does the high school team make it to the
the battle pits the first right? Well, uh, we asked
Paul the same thing. Typically in the fall, high school
team will get started a teacher, usually x as liaison
inside the school recruits students. Might be twenty five students
(11:15):
on a team, male female students, all ages UH and
then a few mentors from the local area from engineering
professional firms in the area will then form a team
and on the first Saturday of January, teams gather all
across the country and auditoriums and over the NASA satellite network,
we unveil the game. And it's a new game every year. UH.
(11:35):
This year is called Breakaway, which is robots playing soccer.
It's like soccer on steroids. And now we unveil that
game and it's a new game every year because these
are smart kids and mentors and we give them their
kids of parts, five motors, gears, software, sensors. The one
thing we left out was the instructions and then they
have six weeks to design, build, test the robot. They
(11:58):
have to create it up and then FedEx ships six
hundred tons of robots to forty four tournaments around the world,
so they're in it. UH these original events in that Atlanta,
New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Tel Aviv, Toronto.
Uh in teams participate there fifty teams at an event
and the winning teams make it here to the Georgia Dolomons.
(12:20):
So this is the super Bowl of smarts. So are
any of you high schoolers interested in getting involved? Here's
Paul and how you can. And in case you're a
little nervous about signing up, it's a team thing, like
we said before, So no one's gonna expect you to
build this robot. I'll buy yourself. I would say, just
do it, there's no prerequisites. Uh, just joined a team.
(12:41):
I met a couple of high school girls who were
on the team in New Orleans. I asked him and said,
how did you get involved? I said, well, our boyfriend
signed up for this team. We decided to tag along
and someone stuck up power drill in my hand and
I'm hooked. And she says, I've been doing this now
and I'm gonna head to UH college next year to
study mechanical engineering. So again my high school experience, going
(13:02):
to high school in Tennessee, UM, there was mostly athletics.
I remember. It's like football, football, football, and little baseball
or softball whatever they play. Um, a little basketball, but
mostly it was football. So it's athletics. Um, you know,
you had a few little clubs on the side. Uh.
And that's actually a huge deal. The whole you know,
divide between you know, what are you gonna push the
kids to do? What are you gonna, you know, inspire
(13:24):
them with the idea of an athletic superstar or you know,
a scientist. So we asked Paul about this. Well, I'm
pleased to see that more high schools are now awarding
a varsity letter in robotics and some teams get sent
on their way to the championship with a pep rally
uh the day before, which is the right type of
value system here, you get what you celebrate. This is
(13:47):
what we're celebrating. But I met a young woman who said, uh,
she was dropping out of high school uh as a sophomore,
and then her guidance counselors stopped her and said, you
ought to join this robotics team. And she said, her
mother said you have to do this. Uh. And she said, mom,
it will be social suicide for me to join his
(14:07):
robotics team. And her mother drew credit sated, well, and
you can't be a cheerleader anymore. She got on the team, UH,
thrived on it. UH. And I saw her she uh
now is a mentor of a team because she wanted
to get a degree in mechanical engineering. She's got a
great job as a design engineer, and she says, I'm
now giving back and I think it's the coolest thing
I ever did, and it really changed the course of
(14:28):
my life. Yeah, speaking of cheerleaders and females, and yeah,
of course we know that there are male cheerleaders too.
Did you have many male cheerleaders at your school? I
don't remember. I don't think we did. Cheerleading was not
a big thing in the North Beast where I grew up. O. Yeah,
so soccer. A lot of people played soccer. A lot
of people are persistent about chasing that ball around. So
we were wondering what First was doing to attract female
(14:50):
students to robotics. And it's a lot. As it turns out,
at the high school level, about of our teams are
made of females, which is higher than the sence and
engineering population in general. So I know we're attracting more
girls to the competitions. Uh what We're reaching out with
them in a couple of ways. We've made up an
alliance with the Girl Scouts, and there's a Girl Scouts
(15:13):
patch that you can earn by being on a robotics team.
We just formed an alliance with the Society of Women
Engineers to have these female professionals serve as mentors for
these teams. Uh. And we're also awarding new areas we're entering,
like the green field, and so we are creating a
(15:33):
green recycling projects, green energy audits as a way to
attract more females to do things that they see socially
relevant beyond building a robot. And that's working. Obviously, robots
continue to just get more and more advanced leading up
to the day when they inevitably become self conscious and takeover. Um.
We didn't have thought about that though. Some friends of
(15:55):
mine were really saying, Hey, ask him, when, what are
the chances of robots becoming self aware of this year's
first and taking over humanity? Um? And we should ask
them about the singularity totally. Yeah, And I figured it's
probably like each first, you know, get all the robots
together in one room, they're gonna talk, they're gonna organize. Um. Yeah,
what goes on after the lights go down in the
Church of Dome. I don't know if maybe next year
(16:15):
we'll find out. But we asked Paul about about some
of the technologies that the bots are showcasing and how
that's changed first over the years. Yeah, and what kind
of technologies they're gonna adopt for future competitions. Well, we're
getting more and more sophisticated. I got this year. There's
a versephisticated video camera and Intel help donate Classmate PCs
(16:37):
for the driver's station. We're using out WiFi as a
means of communicating between the robots. Uh. And so you're
gonna see some awesome play out there with robots on
their own finding the targets, shooting the balls. In the future,
you'll see things like optical character recognition uh and uh
even online simulations of what we're doing. So my favorite
(16:58):
robot is Maximum Alien from the Black Hole fictional. Uh.
So I had to ask Paul what his favorite robot
is and he let us know. Well, I saw a
robot built by one of the first Robotics team members
with the Lego mind Storms robot. You put a scrambled
Rubics cube in its arms. The video camera scans it
(17:20):
in nine seconds, transmits the data into a laptop where
he's programmed an algorithm that solves it in four seconds,
and then instructs the arms to unscramble it and solve
the entire Rubisque problem in fifty three seconds, and this
young man is thirteen years old. That is a cool
robot and a pretty cool kid. That's a good answer.
(17:41):
I totally saw that video on YouTube with the Rubick's
Cube robot, did you. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing. I
mean it's no you know, kill a red robot at
this rating, Anthony Perkins. But it's pretty good. So that
wraps it up for first Stuff from the Science Lab
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(18:03):
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Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison Madamel, the science editor how stuff Works
dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science rider how
stuff Works dot Com. And this episode we finally took
(00:24):
Stuff from the Science Lab on the road, although not
very far down the road, yeah, not not too bad
to the Georgia Dome for the first championship held April
fifteen through April seventeen, and we got up close in
personal with robots and their young masters. Yeah. It's it's
pretty cool, um just to I guess set the scene
for everybody. Uh again, this is the Georgia Dome. This
(00:46):
is where they play football hockey like football football. Yeah
you like I said that that's kind of the Southern
accent football, right I think. So, Yeah, this is the
first time, like we both of us went to it
last year for the blocks, so this was this was
the first time that I've been back to the Georgia Dome.
I'm just not a sports guy. Uh. So you have
(01:07):
this big you know sports uh auditorium type deal, right,
and it's just but just just loaded with nerds. And
I mean that in the most complimentary, uh fashion possible,
Like these are just awesome nerdiness going on in this
this building. UM and of course chaperone's um, adult volunteers, UM.
(01:29):
Then and then then kids dressed up as their mascots.
It's amazing. Yeah, there are a lot of mohawks going on.
I actually I'm a big fan of the mohawks, so
that's that's always nice to see some mohawks. And they're
pumping music like all sorts of like high energy you know,
kind of kind of beats going on, and it looks
like everybody was on some sort of sugar um, you know,
(01:49):
just in a lot of audio visual stuff, like there's
something with like when we first got there, uh, the
rock was on this big screen talking about NASA. UM.
I didn't know what that was about. But so while
we were at the First Championship, we actually took the
opportunity to interview the president of First, a gentleman named
President Paul Godonus. Let's let Paul explain what FIRST is
(02:11):
for those of you guys not familiar with it, Well,
FIRST stands for for Inspiration and Recognition as science and technology.
It's the world's largest robotics competition for grade school and
high school students that we started about twenty years ago
by inventor Dean Kaman seen invented the segue. He recently
a robotic prosthetic arm. He has four hundred patents for
(02:33):
a lot of medical devices, and he got this started
with twenty eight high school teams mentored by some local
companies UH twenty years ago and this year we have
nineteen thousand teams from grade school through high school around
the world participating in our robotics competitions. Blake Paul said.
High school teams have traveled from all around the world
to compete in the championships this weekend. Did you know what
(02:54):
what I'm talking about? That one team from the Middle East?
I think it was a combination Israeli UM like Palestinian
collaboration or something. Yeah. So you can see all these
teams cloud in their team shirts and their get ups,
and there's an awards for imagery I think, so that
kind of explained some of the crazy costumes. And then
there was like one team that was just a bunch
of robots and they were they had a human child
(03:15):
that they were forcing to compete in the really yeah,
and everybody's wheeling their robots and trolleys to and fab
It's it's pretty cool. Well, hey, let's hear from some
of the mini teams that were competing. We're Team thirteen
seventy nine, the Gear Devils from North across Georgia and
right now we're working on fixing our kicker. Oh. We've
been competing for like about eight years and we come
(03:39):
to Georgia Dome pretty much every other year. Yeah, they
had that awesome Masca at the Blue Devil. I think
we'll get a shot of him on the blog if
we can which one vil. He's the devil who's blue. Okay,
let's hear from another team. So we're from San Diego, California.
We're a rookie team from Canyon Crest Academy High scho Yeah.
(04:00):
I love these guys. The aluminum nar walls and they
had to the narwhale helmets on, Like these helmets with
these big um it's not a tusk because it wouldn't
our walls have I guess it's a tusk unicorn horn
tip deal coming out of their heads and you know, yeah,
they're a little bit too cool for school. Initially, Remember
we had to chase them yeah. Yeah, and then they
finally rallied together and shout at their team name into
(04:22):
the microphone at the end. Yeah, and they had to
get a little bit organized the the that's some of
the teams were a little faster on the rally. So yeah,
the vibe at first I touched on this earlier, but
but it's just it's just awesome because these these kids
are running around and just enthusiastic about science and about robotics. Um,
the parents and the volunteers, the chaperones, everybody's just like
(04:44):
really gung ho um, and and the nerdiness is like
right out in the open. Uh, like just unabashed nerdiness
and geekiness and just just a love of science. And
it's just you know, it's in the air. It's it's infectious. Really.
I mean, you just you want to go home and
hug your room, but give little games to play in
the living room, that's right, that's right. Yeah, And with
(05:06):
that vibe, you kind of get excited about the future
of robotics here in the United States and globally, right, Yeah,
that's what it's all about. Yeah. So here's First President
Paul Gadonis again talking about how some of the high
schoolers involved in First Fair Leader in Life, for example,
they're fift more likely to go on to college after
they graduate high school. We have twelve million dollars of
scholarships open to them to enable them to go on
(05:26):
to college. And there are three or four times as
likely to study engineering or science than their peers who
weren't on a team. And it's not a different group
of students. We just had the exposure of being on
a first team. And we've got ninety thousand wonderful volunteers,
often professional engineers from companies like Cisco and Google and
Boeing and IBM and so on, and NASA who inspire
(05:49):
these kids, do you ask? Of course, has had a
lot of problems getting kids interested in science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics, and now we collectively knew these areas of
interest a stem right, and the US has launched initiatives
like this sum Education Coalition, which is co chaired by
folks such as the American Chemical Society and the National
Science Teachers Association to change that scenario. So here's Paul
(06:10):
talking about why he thinks the US has been struggling
with the issue. Well, things have changed. Well since when
I was growing up in the sixties. Uh, it was
the space race. It felt like a patriotic duty to
study math and science to get to the moon first.
But today our media tells young people that the way
to fame and fortune is to bounce the ball or
try to send your way into a Hollywood stage, instead
(06:31):
of using your brain to do something useful for our society.
And so that's what we're trying to show, that it's
cool to be smart. So I'm pretty sure that my
high school did not have a robotics team. How about yours?
We didn't. Yeah, would you have joined if they were? In?
Um see, I don't know, because my my initial reaction
would be, like, you know, thinking back to myself in
(06:53):
high school, I probably would be a little intimidated. I mean,
I wasn't I wasn't that much of a science dork
at the time. You're more of an English doork, right, Yeah,
I'm just a dork in general, I guess. But but yeah,
and I would have probably thought, hey, I don't really
know how robots work, and you know, and and this
was you know, this was olden days when they weren't
in our living rooms eating dust, so um so yeah,
(07:15):
I would have been a little intimidated. But but having
gone to the event, I know that it's more of
a team type deals and it's not like, you know,
they say, all right, welcome to the team, go build
a robot they can shoot a basketball. And now it's
not quite like that. It's it's hey, we're working together,
et cetera. Right, So, about ten percent of US high
schools now have a first robotics team, but a lot don't.
Here's Paul and my More high schools don't have robotics teams. Well,
(07:37):
it's a good question them, after all, they all have
a varsity basketball team or varsity football team. I think
part of it is just learning that first robotics is
out there, you know. So we are expanding the number
of teams. We're calling on schools, encouraging principles and teachers
to support a team. We're finding more corporate sponsors, companies
(07:58):
like Boeing and be A systems in Google who will
help fund teams. So I think primarily it's getting the
word out so that when we go into a high school,
we find that uh, kids sign up when they hear
about it because they think it's cool, or even if
they don't know about what it is. They get they
get started, um and boom they say, hey, this is
a lot of fun. And there is also the issue
of teacher pay with First right, our teachers getting paid
(08:22):
for their efforts. Let's hear from Paul on that to
the teacher, I mean, I'd like to see the teachers
get rewarded for doing this, uh financially, just like the
English teacher who runs the drama club or play or
the football coach after school. Uh. So we encourage that
among our school teams. But it's not as their teachers
(08:43):
are the only adults involved. There are thousands of volunteers
helping out, and a lot of them have related expertise
that they're more than willing to share. Right. We talked
to one of those volunteers, the kilt guy. It was
technically what a utility kilt until a kilt I think
they call them? Yeah, pretty cool. We talked to him
about his volunteering with First and because Robert said, guy
(09:05):
wearing a killer is bound to give some good quotes. Um, yeah,
this is a This is a U tailor kilt company
based in Seattle, a modernary reinterpretation of the kilt very comfortable.
I'm a great supporter of unbifurcated freedom. UM quick shout out,
I hope they give you a free one. UM. Yeah.
So I got involved in First a couple of years ago.
My my son was going to high school in Bridgewater, Massachusetts,
(09:29):
which had a team called Team at eight T J Squared,
which one of the first I don't think they were
in the first year of First, but they think they
joined him like the second year. It's a very old
veteran team. UM. And he he sort of had some
interest in robotics and dragged me along to one of
the meetings. And I'm a I'm a research engineer, electronics
engineer by training, so I got involved. They needed some
(09:50):
help with programming electronics. I got involved initially with the team,
and I thought I'd give a little bit back by
volunteering this year. UM. So we're running the practice field
where teams can but basically try out things they can't
really try on the field or they need to work
on the field. So teams are trying out the autonomous mode,
(10:11):
which is the first fifteen seconds of automatic operation. UM.
So that typically they need to do some tuning. They
might have several ideas, they want to make sure they
get the timing rights, etcetera. Um, and then some other
teams are trying out modifications and just trying some ideas
or different drive approaches, which again it's in a they
have a bit more time here and people aren't trying
(10:31):
to ram into you and everything, so it's an opportunity
to to practice and to sort of, you know, get
a get a bit more experienced before you go out
into the scary stuff on the main field. I'm a
great supporter of unbifurcated food and that that was my
best line from the whole first interview, and it didn't
even come I'm sorry from you, Paul, that it came
from this volunteer. Go was awesome. Yeah, yeah, he u
(10:51):
he was. He was quite a character and it was
very enthusiastic about the whole of that. So you're probably wanting,
how does the high school team make it to the
the battle pits the first right? Well, uh, we asked
Paul the same thing. Typically in the fall, high school
team will get started a teacher, usually x as liaison
inside the school recruits students. Might be twenty five students
(11:15):
on a team, male female students, all ages UH and
then a few mentors from the local area from engineering
professional firms in the area will then form a team
and on the first Saturday of January, teams gather all
across the country and auditoriums and over the NASA satellite network,
we unveil the game. And it's a new game every year. UH.
(11:35):
This year is called Breakaway, which is robots playing soccer.
It's like soccer on steroids. And now we unveil that
game and it's a new game every year because these
are smart kids and mentors and we give them their
kids of parts, five motors, gears, software, sensors. The one
thing we left out was the instructions and then they
have six weeks to design, build, test the robot. They
(11:58):
have to create it up and then FedEx ships six
hundred tons of robots to forty four tournaments around the world,
so they're in it. UH these original events in that Atlanta,
New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Tel Aviv, Toronto.
Uh in teams participate there fifty teams at an event
and the winning teams make it here to the Georgia Dolomons.
(12:20):
So this is the super Bowl of smarts. So are
any of you high schoolers interested in getting involved? Here's
Paul and how you can. And in case you're a
little nervous about signing up, it's a team thing, like
we said before, So no one's gonna expect you to
build this robot. I'll buy yourself. I would say, just
do it, there's no prerequisites. Uh, just joined a team.
(12:41):
I met a couple of high school girls who were
on the team in New Orleans. I asked him and said,
how did you get involved? I said, well, our boyfriend
signed up for this team. We decided to tag along
and someone stuck up power drill in my hand and
I'm hooked. And she says, I've been doing this now
and I'm gonna head to UH college next year to
study mechanical engineering. So again my high school experience, going
(13:02):
to high school in Tennessee, UM, there was mostly athletics.
I remember. It's like football, football, football, and little baseball
or softball whatever they play. Um, a little basketball, but
mostly it was football. So it's athletics. Um, you know,
you had a few little clubs on the side. Uh.
And that's actually a huge deal. The whole you know,
divide between you know, what are you gonna push the
kids to do? What are you gonna, you know, inspire
(13:24):
them with the idea of an athletic superstar or you know,
a scientist. So we asked Paul about this. Well, I'm
pleased to see that more high schools are now awarding
a varsity letter in robotics and some teams get sent
on their way to the championship with a pep rally
uh the day before, which is the right type of
value system here, you get what you celebrate. This is
(13:47):
what we're celebrating. But I met a young woman who said, uh,
she was dropping out of high school uh as a sophomore,
and then her guidance counselors stopped her and said, you
ought to join this robotics team. And she said, her
mother said you have to do this. Uh. And she said, mom,
it will be social suicide for me to join his
(14:07):
robotics team. And her mother drew credit sated, well, and
you can't be a cheerleader anymore. She got on the team, UH,
thrived on it. UH. And I saw her she uh
now is a mentor of a team because she wanted
to get a degree in mechanical engineering. She's got a
great job as a design engineer, and she says, I'm
now giving back and I think it's the coolest thing
I ever did, and it really changed the course of
(14:28):
my life. Yeah, speaking of cheerleaders and females, and yeah,
of course we know that there are male cheerleaders too.
Did you have many male cheerleaders at your school? I
don't remember. I don't think we did. Cheerleading was not
a big thing in the North Beast where I grew up. O. Yeah,
so soccer. A lot of people played soccer. A lot
of people are persistent about chasing that ball around. So
we were wondering what First was doing to attract female
(14:50):
students to robotics. And it's a lot. As it turns out,
at the high school level, about of our teams are
made of females, which is higher than the sence and
engineering population in general. So I know we're attracting more
girls to the competitions. Uh what We're reaching out with
them in a couple of ways. We've made up an
alliance with the Girl Scouts, and there's a Girl Scouts
(15:13):
patch that you can earn by being on a robotics team.
We just formed an alliance with the Society of Women
Engineers to have these female professionals serve as mentors for
these teams. Uh. And we're also awarding new areas we're entering,
like the green field, and so we are creating a
(15:33):
green recycling projects, green energy audits as a way to
attract more females to do things that they see socially
relevant beyond building a robot. And that's working. Obviously, robots
continue to just get more and more advanced leading up
to the day when they inevitably become self conscious and takeover. Um.
We didn't have thought about that though. Some friends of
(15:55):
mine were really saying, Hey, ask him, when, what are
the chances of robots becoming self aware of this year's
first and taking over humanity? Um? And we should ask
them about the singularity totally. Yeah, And I figured it's
probably like each first, you know, get all the robots
together in one room, they're gonna talk, they're gonna organize. Um. Yeah,
what goes on after the lights go down in the
Church of Dome. I don't know if maybe next year
(16:15):
we'll find out. But we asked Paul about about some
of the technologies that the bots are showcasing and how
that's changed first over the years. Yeah, and what kind
of technologies they're gonna adopt for future competitions. Well, we're
getting more and more sophisticated. I got this year. There's
a versephisticated video camera and Intel help donate Classmate PCs
(16:37):
for the driver's station. We're using out WiFi as a
means of communicating between the robots. Uh. And so you're
gonna see some awesome play out there with robots on
their own finding the targets, shooting the balls. In the future,
you'll see things like optical character recognition uh and uh
even online simulations of what we're doing. So my favorite
(16:58):
robot is Maximum Alien from the Black Hole fictional. Uh.
So I had to ask Paul what his favorite robot
is and he let us know. Well, I saw a
robot built by one of the first Robotics team members
with the Lego mind Storms robot. You put a scrambled
Rubics cube in its arms. The video camera scans it
(17:20):
in nine seconds, transmits the data into a laptop where
he's programmed an algorithm that solves it in four seconds,
and then instructs the arms to unscramble it and solve
the entire Rubisque problem in fifty three seconds, and this
young man is thirteen years old. That is a cool
robot and a pretty cool kid. That's a good answer.
(17:41):
I totally saw that video on YouTube with the Rubick's
Cube robot, did you. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing. I
mean it's no you know, kill a red robot at
this rating, Anthony Perkins. But it's pretty good. So that
wraps it up for first Stuff from the Science Lab
road trip. We hope you guys enjoyed it. And as always,
you can type robots or robot into the search bar
and how Stuff works homepage and see what good stuff
(18:03):
that brings up. We've got things about robot armies, robots
getting married, robots becoming self aware and taking over the world. Yeah,
we just every news you wrote about robots being alive. Yes,
I like that article. I thought it. Let's give on
And of course we're getting more technologically advanced to you.
And we're on Twitter now, so follow us on Twitter
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(18:24):
We're on their stuff from the Science Lab. Just put
that into the bar and search for it, and you
can always shoot us an email at Science Stuff at
how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you
think of the podcast, if you have any suggestions for
future episodes, and let us know about your relationship with
with robots if you are, especially if you're a member
of robotics team or volunteer with one you know, let
(18:45):
us know about your experiences. We'd love to hear from
you for moral this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff works,
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