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Revenge of the Nerds
Robots rule as high-school techies take over Coliseum
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Business New Haven
4/15/2002
By: E.A. Linden
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Something strange and exciting happened over the weekend April 4-6, and most New Haveners didn't even know about it. Sixty-five teams of high school students, teachers and technology professionals converged on New Haven's Veterans Memorial Coliseum for the 2002 FIRST Robotics Regional Competition, a New England-wide event culminating in a national championship at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla. Later this month.
The season officially began in January when high school teams from all over country were sent a standard “kit of parts” containing motors, sensors, bearings, Velcro, pulleys and a 900Mhz radio system. A single 12-volt DC battery powered each bot.
But for many teams the work starts well before the kit actually arrives with extensive planning and training sessions to prepare for the six weeks of construction. Explained Jacob Trueb, a sophomore on Loomis Chaffee's “Team Paragon” who built the ball cage of his team's robot, “We worked four nights a week and three hours a night for four weeks.”
But the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science & Technology) competition is not only about robot construction, it is also a fierce “athletic” competition that pits robot against robot in a game of capturing soccer balls and goal manipulation that takes place on a regulation course over two minutes. On the sidelines the robots were controlled by students using computers and joysticks.
The excitement was infectious. As the machines warmed up to strains of Phil Collins' “Big Time,” and cotton-candy vendors plied the aisles, team spirit soared. One crew, the Dirty Birds of Keene (N.H.) High School, handed out black-and-orange Mardi Gras beads that matched their tie-dyed shirts.
The Techno Tigers, Bullard Havens Regional Vocational School's team from Bridgeport, all wore matching black bowling shirts embroidered with a fierce Chinese-style dragon, while the Blueprints of Merrimack (N.H.) High School opted for a slightly more sardonic choice; the backs of their T-shirts read, “Best Unpaid Crew in the World.”
FIRST founder Dean Kamen, the multimillionaire entrepreneur and inventor (most spectacularly of the Segway human transporter), founded the non-profit organization in the hope of elevating the status of recreational science in schools to something as appreciated as sports, music and other on-campus group activities that generally receive more attention - and money.
Kelsey Martin, a junior on the Merrimack (N.H.) High School team, explained how, following a school assembly at which her team demonstrated their robot's capabilities, things changed: “When we walked back into the assembly people started cheering - like we were a sports team. It's cool that robotics gets recognition, too.”
Sharon Suchecki, a senior on Team Rage (a group of students from East Hartford, Rockville, and Coventry high schools) who calls herself “Battery Girl,” explained that her team's status at school has soared since the group began winning competitions. “[Last year] we won the Long Island regionals. Now people realize we aren't one of those wussie teams.”
But this competition wasn't just about glory. It is about forging relationships between corporate sponsors and, in some cases, some very needy schools. Junior Robert Nadsen explains that his team, the Keene, N.H. Dirty Birds, was one of the original teams to compete in FIRST before they lost their sponsorship and had to sit out a few years. Now they are back, in their third competition since finding new sponsorship from the Market Corp. and Portex. “It is a very expensive project,” Nadsen explains, “and hard to do without sponsorship.”
For that reason teams must get creative in their fundraising. In cases where a team might not find one or two sponsors to carry the total cost of the season, some opt for multiple small-business sponsorships and grass-roots fundraising, everything from spaghetti dinners to bottle-and-can drives. This additional fundraising can often consume the other half of the students' year.
Bruce Hockiday is one of the engineers who volunteers his time to work with Team Rage. He has been with the team eight years, ever since the company he was working for then, United Technologies, became team sponsor. Explained Hockiday: “When I was in high school I lacked direction. Now I'm hoping to catch kids before they get that far.”
All in all, most participants judged the weekend a success. The students competed and learned valuable lessons - even some about robotics. By weekend's, it was clear to all that something important had happened, that these robots that literally took over the Coliseum and had consumed so many hours of the students,' teachers' and engineers' hard work had somehow morphed from small-time school tech projects to something bigger.
For one weekend, at least, robots were cool.
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