Robotics FIRST Promotes Necessary Skills

This upcoming weekend is the 2009 FIRST Championship in Atlanta, Georgia. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is the brainchild of famed inventor Dean Kamen and seeks to motivate high school students explore understanding of science and technology by developing robotic technologies. In Atlanta there will be over 500 robots competing with over 10,000 students involved.

Two posts over at the Science Progress blog address this upcoming challenge, and both are useful. The key is that the process is working. Students who are taking part in these challenges are gaining the scientific skills they need in the future, especially the ability to keep working on a difficult problem until it is resolved (or, in other words, to tinker).

• Science Progress Blog - Making Robots Personal: An Interview with Tandy Trower of Microsoft Robots
• Science Progress Blog - Robots to the Rescue: The Next Generation of Inventors Needs to Learn How to Tinker

(Anecdote time.) The importance of being comfortable with tinkering became clear to me this weekend, when I helped my mother paint her bedroom. In order to paint the room, I had to move a lot of furniture out, which also involved unplugging her modem. Later, when I tried to set up her webcam (which she bought so that she could video-chat with her grandson), I plugged the modem temporarily into a phone jack on the kitchen counter.

She freaked out, because she had no idea how to "fix it." I was genuinely perplexed, because to me the worst that could happen when trying to fix it is that you'd end up with a phone that doesn't work until you get all the wires sorted out (and she had another phone, so even that wasn't a crucial issue). But the thing is that my mother, when it comes to technology, is not confident enough to tinker with machines. The thought of doing something wrong fills her with mortal dread.

Success at anything - especially in the sciences - requires a degree of comfort with trying something, failing at it, and realizing that the world did not end and you're able to try a different path. Every story of success in science is a series of failures and frustrations that ultimately ends in a profound achievement. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Edison, Einstein, Hawking ... you name a scientist or inventor who has achieved success, and that success can be found to be built upon a foundation of failures overcome.

The students who take part in FIRST certainly confront challenges, and they have to learn how to adapt, modify their plans, and work through the failures and frustrations. This is more important than any of the specific technical skills they can obtain. And these are the same skills which, as I recently discussed, mean that science students choosing non-science careers has potentially a great impact on society as a whole. The adaptability required by studying science and technology, the ability to stick with a problem until you can get it to work out, is applicable to all areas of life (as I found out two weekends ago, when I tiled my back room. I'm honestly not a handyman, though my wife and mother appear to think that I am.)

So if you're a student (or a teacher, or a parent) reading this, remember how important it is to fail. It's the only way you'll ever become great.

...and, if you're in Atlanta this weekend, check out the FIRST competition and support those 10,000 students who are in the process of overcoming their failures to become the leaders of tomorrow.