Judging only from the title of Neal Bascomb’s fast-paced book, The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts
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Judging only from the title of Neal Bascomb’s fast-paced book, The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts, ProfHacker readers might think I’d made a mistake, and queued here a piece I’d written for GeekDad. And while I am writing about the book for that site too, I suspect that its appeal will be much broader. Anyone interested in secondary education in America, and in the kinds of students our schools produce, will find something of interest in this book. Those of us who think that well-designed curricula ought to culminate with students building something meaningful will find the book moving.
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization founded by Dean Kamen to support kids’ interest in science, technology, and engineering. Recognizing that our celebrity culture tends to devalue these kinds of knowledge, Kamen wanted to create an activity, and an organization, that would reward those students who show an aptitude for tinkering and experimenting. The centerpiece of the program is the FIRST Robotics Competition, a challenge-based annual program in which over thousands of high-school-based teams from around the world work with teachers and technical mentors to solve an engineering challenge in six weeks. The New Cool tells the story of one team’s quest to win the 2009 FIRST competition. In addition to the robotics competition, FIRST also sponsors a LEGO League for middle schoolers, and a Jr. LEGO League for elementary school students. (I should acknowledge that I’ve coached a Jr. LEGO League team in the past, and hope to do so again next fall.)
The team at the heart of The New Cool is the Dos Pueblos D’Penguineers, and their teacher, Amir Abo-Shaeer. These days, the Dos Pueblos team is much-honored, and Abo-Shaeer is the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. In 2009, however, their FIRST robotics team was very much a fledgling program. The Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy is a program with the Dos Pueblos (Santa Barbara) High School, a public school, and it provides a science/engineering focus for students interested in those topics. It began in 2002-03, and took its current form in 2006 when the FIRST robotics competition was embedded into the program as a senior-year capstone project. Because the program was so new, the Abo-Shaeer and his robotics team must frequently break away from their precious build time to recruit students and raise funds.
The 2009 challenge, dubbed Lunacy, required teams to build a robot that could 1) successfully move on a surface that mimicked the gravity of the moon, 2) gather up “moon rocks” (balls), and 3) throw them into the trailer of other team’s robots. For a portion of the competition, the robot would be human-controlled, but for others, it would act autonomously. The FIRST organization provides specifications, and some standard gear--"srpokets, wheels, gears, bags of bolts, a camera, extension cables, a compact fan, an air compressor, yellow tubing, big motors and small, a lazy Susan, a joystick, master links for chains, bearings, a 12-volt battery, a simple chassis, and even a pair of gloves” (41) that every team uses. But that gear can be implemented in a wide variety of ways, and modding is more than encouraged--it’s practically required. (Teams can “spend thirty-five hundred dollars on raw materials to be fabricated into additional parts” [41]--it’s no wonder that there’s a page on fundraising on the FIRST site!) As they work through the challenge, the Dos Pueblos students become proficient with CAD software, with a lathe and other machine tools, at debugging code, and much else besides. The tolerances involved are so precise that when the robot is anodized, it adds a 1/16 of an inch layer to critical parts, so they no longer fit adequately.
Abo-Shaeer’s core insight is as banal as it is galvanizing: Students get from their education almost exactly what they put into it, so the goal of any curriculum needs to be maximum engagement. Bascomb’s book makes clear the sacrifices that these students make during their six week build: they commit to working from 3pm-9pm on weekdays, but then many start staying until midnight, and in the final burst, many are there until 3am or later. Nerves fray, personalities clash, late-night burritos get eaten--the whole gamut of human emotion, compressed into six weeks. If there are moments when the intensity of Abo-Shaeer’s demands can seem off-putting, it’s clear that the students seem willing to go through walls for him--and then it’s worth remembering how such intensity is celebrated when it comes from a football or basketball coach.
Bascomb’s book is best, not when it focuses on Abo-Shaeer’s plans to remake American education, but when he captures the voice of the D’Penguineers. One of my favorite instances comes late in the book, when the team is walking through the competition venue:
“There’s some serious uncool walking around this place.” Gabe laughed, reminding them of some of the crazier costumes he had seen during the past two days.“It’s cool because our whole school thinks it’s awesome. We’ve had some cheerleaders come to our competition,” Kevin said.
After giving it some thought, Chase added: “I don’t know if it’s that robotics is cool, but whenever you do something so intensely and go all out, it’s pretty much cool, no matter what it is.”
. . .
“What people don’t get,” Kevin said, “is that the product of all this work is a massive robot. Normally hard work ends with ‘Oh, Gabe got an A on his math test. Good job.’ But they see this and say, ‘Wait, high school people do this? Are you kidding me?’” (296-97)
Fair warning: This book may well make you want to pick up a soldering iron and a digital caliper. But it also clarifies how much work remains to be done in secondary and higher education. After all, despite Bascomb’s title, this isn’t *just* the work of a visionary teacher--though Abo-Shaeer obviously deserves a ton of credit. But the robotics program is a capstone to an entire 4-year curriculum. It’s not going to be enough for individual teachers to design engaging projects for their students--though that’s a start. The challenge will be getting departments organized around such immersive approaches to their subject.
It’s not a perfect book. While the story of the D’Penguineers is inspiring on its own, it often feels as though the bathos level has to be dialed to 11. Every student profiled overcomes some significant challenge, and the team’s story is linked to the birth of their teacher’s first child. (This is becoming a bit of a nerd-book cliché--see the similar narrative in Jonathan Bender’s otherwise excellent LEGO: A Love Story.) And this is a book that would’ve benefited from pictures! Especially early on in the book, it can be hard to visualize the nature of the challenges. And while there is some attention paid to other teams--a team from New York, for example, and teams funded by Ford and GM, respectively--those sections feel like distractions from the main story. That said, the book is a compelling read--and not too onerous for in-semester reading, I don’t think. Or spring break!
Bascomb has a site in support of the book, of course, and here’s the trailer for The New Cool:
FIRST is an amazing program, and The New Cool does a terrific job capturing the intensity of its challenges as well as the special appeal of that intensity to a certain kind of kid. As readable as any sports story, but with lots of outstanding nerdy detail, Bascomb’s book deserves a wide readership.
Photo by Flickr user BurningQuestion / Creative Commons licensed
