Breakaway

This year’s FIRST Robotics Competition started off on a new tone. Gone were the usual mock game show and the dramatic buildup before unveiling this year’s challenge. Instead, FIRST co-founder Dean Kamen came on screen to talk about the program taking a new direction. Beyond the usual criticism of financial engineering and professional athletes, his words cut to the point: “I don’t like the direction FIRST is going in.”

After Dean’s speech, fellow co-founder Woodie Flowers elaborated. He spoke about combining intelligence with creativity, which would give the United States comparative advantage as a country of inventors and creative thinkers. He continued by extolling the virtues of liberal arts, and reminding us of the importance of empathy. Finally, FIRST unveiled a challenge designed with the help of a movie director and a Cirque du Soleil choreographer – called “Breakaway” – that started a transformation of FIRST Robotics to make it into a spectator sport.

Surprising? In some ways, yes. FIRST is a program for engineers, and the six-week build season in which high school teams construct 120-pound robots has always been the competition’s focus. FIRST Robotics has always been about learning engineering and science, and doing so in an environment that simulates a professional engineer’s workplace. But at the same time, FIRST’s goal has always been to change society, and so inspiration and learning life skills have been high up on program organizers’ lists.

FIRST’s Success

That’s how FIRST became arguably the most successful “nerd” competition in the nation. Starting from 28 teams at a gym in 1982, it’s grown into a program with four competitions for students anywhere between elementary school and high school, with events at the district, regional, and international level. FIRST succeeded in the same way science clubs and science fairs turned into international events after World War II – but unlike Intel ISEF and the Siemens Competition, it was built ground-up by educators and organizers rather than corporate leaders.

Companies like GM, Boeing, and Motorola have been strategic partners of FIRST, but no more than that. They’ve started initiatives to support FIRST rather than guide it, like NASA’s Robotics Alliance Project. But the nonprofit is led by people like Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor who pioneered engineering teaching techniques, who are connected with but distinct from the world of business and commercial R&D.

It’s a system that still benefits sponsors. Ken Streeter of BAE Systems, the second-largest defense contractor in the world, said that his company had learned much from FRC about “the creation of small, fast moving and effective teams…the canonical FIRST model.” But this kind of synergy benefits companies on a wholly different level. Science fairs are about science and research competitions are about research, but FIRST so strongly rewards going beyond science for the sake of science and engineering for the sake of engineering that it’s different. Better research and presentation will make you the best among research competition participants, but becoming one of the best FIRST teams requires the soft skills that Woodie and Dean talked about.

At the kickoff Woodie Flowers said, “this thing we’re launching today is not about building a robot, it’s about changing society. Remember Gracious Professionalism, remember informed thinking, and remember critical analysis – all three, all the time.” Gracious Professionalism is FIRST’s kind of sportsmanship, which reminds competitors that there is more to FIRST than a game, that failure should be tolerated and success honored. It rewards hard work over gamesmanship, and encourages innovation beyond the playing field.

Gracious Professionalism, along with the critical thinking and analysis that Flowers mentioned, have made FIRST into a successful program. An intense competition and sophisticated engineering do draw people to a competition, but if those are all you have then you end up with a scene much like combat robotics – a group of highly experienced, technically brilliant engineers absorbed in their own competitions, but with little impact on society.

Combine technical talent with organizing skill and a diverse skill set, though, and it becomes possible to attract 90,000 dedicated volunteers worldwide as FIRST has. Some are retired and current teachers who bring their connections and status to FIRST because they see how it fulfills the goals of the educational system better than it does itself. Some are experienced organizers who bring their skills to engineering education because they see it as a field in which they have can the most impact. The rest – and the majority – are professional engineers and scientists looking for more than a technical challenge. They’re looking for a way to pass on their wisdom and make a difference in the world, by mentoring in most cases. They like to see a competition that sees beyond engineering, that values soft skills and business talent too.

FIRST has done a good job of surpassing science and engineering programs like Science Olympiad¹ and science fairs, and without the pull of extravagant prizes and prestigious awards (at least at first). It’s avoided the trap of existing for its own sake, and pushed for social change.

So it’s a good thing that FIRST has started bringing the emphasis back to creativity and analysis, as we saw at kickoff. It’s more than a useful personal quality to have. In the words of Thomas Friedman, “being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. So our schools have a doubly hard task — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.” Those traits have become necessary.

Improving technology and accelerating communication are changing the world, offshoring the jobs of average programmers while creating opportunities for above-average ones to do better than ever. Lead developers have some of the fastest-growing salaries in the IT job market; startups are making engineers with business skills rich. Consulting and computer security are also fast-growing sectors, and both of them deal with the fringes of computer and information science. These are places where a technical grounding is useful, but a diversity of knowledge compounds their effectiveness. And it’s a good thing that all this is being taken into account, because diversity is what made FIRST the great organization that it is now, and it’s what will make it greater in the future.

1. Ironically, Science Olympiad engineering often receives an amazing amount of support from robotics, by using their tools and materials. At regionals, a competitor’s catapult had “robotics” written all over it. And FIRST’s CAD and machining make school projects like this possible. [↩]