Neal Bascomb Discusses FIRST Robotics and The New Cool

Neal Bascomb's The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts offers an insider account of Dean Kamen's famous robotics competition for high schoolers. (See James Kelly's review on GeekDad earlier today.) Focusing on the award-winning Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Penguineers, and their MacArthur award-winning teacher, Amir Abo-Shaeer, The New Cool shows how focusing high school education on a maker-based curriculum can elicit wondrous things from students. It's hard to imagine a book that'd be more appealing to GeekDad readers.

Neal Bascomb spoke with me by phone a few weeks ago.

GD: What got you interested in the FIRST competition?

NB: Originally I heard about FIRST from my nephew. He'd participated in FIRST — he had been perhaps a little awkward in high school, wasn't interested in sports, was very bright. FIRST gave him a direction and a confidence. The change from one year to the next after participating in FIRST was pretty dramatic.

That's how I heard about it, but I didn't really know about it until I went to Manchester, NH for the kickoff of the 2009 season, thinking I would write an article about it. I was just blown away, because A) it was a totally new world that I knew nothing about, and B) the enthusiasm, and how inspired these kids were and how serious they took it was very interesting to me. A third factor was talking to Woodie Flowers about what's education and what's training, which really gave me some insight into how we reach kids. [See Flower's talk, "On Shifting Away from Training Toward Education."]

GD: How did you hook up with Amir Abo-Shaeer? His insight was putting the robotics program at the heart of the curriculum, right?

NB: He's a phenomenal teacher — just watching him teach is engaging. That's how I found about him — I was asking around at FIRST, saying that I needed a teacher. I was originally going to write about three teams: one in New York, one in Detroit, and a third team, and I was pursuing the education angle. Abo-Shaeer was suggested to me. What's so original about what he's doing is how he's integrated robotics into his curriculum and how much emphasis he puts on changing the culture of how we design technology and engineering within his high school. He's a big proponent of getting the kids to go to the school rallies, and bring their robot, and wear their flight suits, and show it off. Which is awesome.

GD: Absolutely! And that fits with Dean Kamen's whole point, that if we're going to motivate a new generation of engineers, we have to transform expectations about what's possible and what's interesting to kids.

NB: Yes. Dean and Amir are closely aligned. I'd say that the difference between them — and they're both coming from their own wheelhouses, right? — is that Dean is looking at it from a global level, and Amir is thinking, "how do you actually make these things work within a school, and how can we replicate that throughout other schools?" FIRST overall isn't worried about getting into the curriculum, although they think that's great. Amir looks at it as essential.

__GD: How did you capture the flavor of the team, and their push to complete the robot? You weren't embedded, I don't imagine . . . __

NB: I had reporters who were embedded with all three teams all season. I have volumes of notes, thousands of pages of notes on all three teams. I could write three books! And then I spent a week here and there with the teams, and then I was with all the competitions for the teams, and I was in Atlanta [for the finals]. So I was pseudo-embedded, and my reporters were super-embedded.

GD: The school has continued to do well in FIRST--have you kept up with the students at all?

__NB:__Yes. I've kept up with the students and with Amir. I spent a lot of time with them at the end of the day, once the reporting started to focus primarily on their team, I spent a lot of time in Goleta. The year I profiled them they won the design award, and then they won that again the subsequent year. They take it pretty seriously. They're not as well-funded, or don't have as well-equipped facilities as some other teams, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another team that works harder.

GD: I certainly hope not!

NB: [Laughs] I know! It's absolutely mad. It was great from a narrative standpoint to watch these kids just stumble in front of your eyes, but it was incredible to watch.

GD: I believe it. But I was really thinking about this when I was writing the review because, on the one hand, my kid is in the public schools, and if a teacher said some of these things to kids, parents would go nuts. At the same time, if a football or basketball coach is that demanding, we really embrace it.

NB: I totally understand what you're saying. Part of the FIRST program, and what Amir is trying to do, and what the book is about, is how much we can expect from these kids beyond sports, where we do expect a great deal. I played sports, and it was a lot of work, and a lot of trips, and a lot of effort, and no one batted an eye. What's great about what Amir does is that he calls in the parents and says, "Listen, you're not going to see your kids for six weeks." [Laughs] I think, to a parent — I remember interviewing one parent near the end, and she said, "My son started this competition as a boy, and he's now a man." I think that's fabulous. I know the Wall Street Journal did a review of the book which was a little bit "on the one hand, on the other," arguing that this program takes too much time. What these people don't get is that it is demanding.

GD: From the point of view of a parent--whether or not your child is interested in science--what kinds of things should we be looking for for our kids?

NB: One, although the book is about FIRST, I would not say that it's the only program, and certainly there's an argument about whether it's the pre-eminent program. But I would certainly encourage parents to go to a FIRST competition, or a Vex Robotics competition, or programs similar to those. Watch it and see how engaged the kids are. My parents came and visited me at one of these competitions, and they were enthralled, and didn't know that something like this existed.

I think secondly that kids learn in lots of different ways, and most schools only teach one or two ways. I went to public schools, too, and I spent 98% of my time in a classroom, with pen and paper in hand, listening to lectures, doing tests, and that was pretty much my educational experience. Fortunately I was pretty good at that style of learning, but other kids learn in different ways. Some kids learn from hands-on experience. Programs like this are exceptional for all different kinds of learners.

(And parents should read the book!)

And the greatest expansion of this program is for kids your son's age [7] --the LEGO Leagues. And there are a lot of different educational outlets. And so my advice is always to look beyond just school.

GD: Do you have thoughts about why robotics, in particular, is so appealing?

NB: I think robotics is appealing because it engages kids on so many different levels. You're grinding down a gear, or you're machining parts with a lathe, or you're wiring parts with electronics, or designing it in AUTOWORKS, or you're programming its brain. There's a lot of different activities that all have to come together in a project, group-based environment. That's why: It's not just a science project where you're doing one thing, like building a volcano. It's a lot of different things at once, and it teaches you a lot of different STEM-related concepts and skills at once.

GD: It is a team activity, but, as with sports teams, it seems as if some teammates are more equal than others. To what extent is that an artifact of narrative needs, and to what extent is that an accepted part of the curriculum?

NB: Listen: there were kids who were more engaged than other kids. [Laughs] If I were to be honest, probably 50% was for narrative reasons, and 50% was just purely the fact that, at 1:00 in the morning, there were usually 8 to 10 kids around out of the class, and they were usually the same 8 to 10 kids. At the end of the season, it was everybody, all of them working together. But for the first two-thirds of the story, there was a lot of work being done by a core group. What's interesting also is all the different aspects of the program that can also engage kids, whether it's the marketing angle, or fund-raising, or doing presentations with the robot. I didn't give too much attention to that in the book, but there were a lot of kids working on those aspects as well.

GD: And that is a significant part of it for FIRST teams, who can spend up to $3500 on equipment?

NB: Yes. $3500 in equipment and other costs. It gets expensive. A lot of people fault FIRST for that. Part of that is a worthy argument: it is expensive. FIRST Robotics Competitions, what I covered in the book, is sort of like the major leagues of it. I think that the FIRST people would say that raising money is part of the point. Nothing's free, and if you want to succeed, or run a company, you're going to have to raise money, and ask for things from people who don't want to give it to you. Better that you learn that when you're 16 than when you're 40.

GD: A fair point! Thanks very much for your time.