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