The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts - Softcover

Bascomb, Neal

 
9780307588906: The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307588904 ISBN 13: 9780307588906
Verlag: Crown, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

That Monday afternoon, in high-school gyms across America, kids were battling for the only glory American culture seems to want to dispense to the young these days: sports glory.  But at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, in a gear-cluttered classroom, a different type of “cool” was brewing.  A physics teacher with a dream – the first public high-school teacher ever to win a MacArthur Genius Award -- had rounded up a band of high-I.Q. students who wanted to put their technical know-how to work.  If you asked these brainiacs what the stakes were that first week of their project, they’d have told you it was all about winning a robotics competition – building the ultimate robot and prevailing in a machine-to-machine contest in front of 25,000 screaming fans at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome.
 
But for their mentor, Amir Abo-Shaeer, much more hung in the balance.
 
The fact was, Amir had in mind a different vision for education, one based not on rote learning -- on absorbing facts and figures -- but on active creation.  In his mind’s eye, he saw an even more robust academy within Dos Pueblos that would make science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) cool again, and he knew he was poised on the edge of making that dream a reality.  All he needed to get the necessary funding was one flashy win – a triumph that would firmly put his Engineering Academy at Dos Pueblos on the map.  He imagined that one day there would be a nation filled with such academies, and a new popular veneration for STEM – a “new cool” – that would return America to its former innovative glory.
 
It was a dream shared by Dean Kamen, a modern-day inventing wizard – often-called “the Edison of his time” – who’d concocted the very same FIRST Robotics Competition that had lured the kids at Dos Pueblos.  Kamen had created FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) nearly twenty years prior.  And now, with a participant alumni base approaching a million strong, he felt that awareness was about to hit critical mass. 
 
But before the Dos Pueblos D’Penguineers could do their part in bringing a new cool to America, they’d have to vanquish an intimidating lineup of “super-teams”– high-school technology goliaths that hailed from engineering hot spots such as Silicon Valley, Massachusetts’ Route 128 technology corridor, and Michigan’s auto-design belt.  Some of these teams were so good that winning wasn’t just hoped for every year, it was expected.
 
In The New Cool, Neal Bascomb manages to make even those who know little about – or are vaguely suspicious of – technology care passionately about a team of kids questing after a different kind of glory.  In these kids’ heartaches and headaches – and yes, high-five triumphs -- we glimpse the path not just to a new way of educating our youth but of honoring the crucial skills a society needs to prosper.  A new cool.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NEAL BASCOMB has published a number of international and national bestsellers, including Higher, The Perfect Mile, Red Mutiny and Hunting Eichmann.  His books have been optioned for film, featured in several documentaries and translated in 10 languages.  He has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. He and his wife and their two daughters make their home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Kickoff

The robot is just a vehicle, just a tool. —DEAN KAMEN

At 4:30 A.M., Saturday, January 3, a white Toyota Matrix was alone on Highway 101, heading south along the Pacific coastline. Its headlights carved a tunnel through the darkness. With one hand on the wheel, Amir Abo-Shaeer drove as fast as he could without getting caught in any speed traps. He wore his usual uniform of old sneakers, cargo shorts, a black sweatshirt, and a FIRST baseball cap.

The son of an Iraqi theoretical physicist and an Irish Catholic from Pennsylvania, Amir was a thirty-seven-year-old teacher at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, and the founder of its engineering academy. He was tall and scarecrow thin, with neatly trimmed dark hair and an almost permanent five o'clock shadow. Small round glasses framed his deeply set brown eyes.

His wife, Emily West, a contrast of blond hair and fair skin, sat in the passenger seat. She came from a Mormon family, her youth split between Utah and California. In the backseat were two seniors from Amir's academy. John Kim had immigrated to the United States from South Korea with his family when he was twelve. His father was a professor of chemical engineering. John spoke a stilted English and still had memories of the instructors at his Seoul grade school beating him with a bat for misbehaving. Beside him sat Kevin Wojcik, a pimpley-faced, athletic seventeen-year-old of Polish descent whose father cleaned pools for a living.

This only-in-America crew was on its way to a kickoff event in Los Angeles for the 2009 FIRST Robotics season. The four of them would watch a live, NASA-streamed webcast of the big show in New Hampshire that would reveal the new season's game. Then they would pick up their kit of parts, the true purpose for their early-morning journey. In six weeks, Amir and his thirty-one students, most of whom were still asleep back in Goleta, a town just west of Santa Barbara, would have to build a robot ready to compete against 1,685 other teams in a game that had never before been played.

No matter what kind of game FIRST announced, their robot would have some essential elements, starting with an ability to move around the field of play. This did not mean legs of the C-3PO variety but rather wheeled motion. Their robot would need mechanisms to perform the tasks set out in this year's game, perhaps retractable arms or maybe a catapult. It would also include sensors, such as a meter to gauge how fast its wheels were turning or a camera to detect a target. The robot would require an electrical system that could relay information coming from the sensors and deliver energy from the battery to the motors driving the wheels and other mechanisms. This electrical system was like a body's nervous and circulatory systems combined. Finally, the robot would need a brain supplied with computer code. This brain would process the information coming from the sensors and allow the robot to both operate on its own and translate the wireless joystick commands from its drivers into action.

The kit Amir and his students would pick up would provide a starting point but no more than that. Building the robot would demand long hours and undoubtedly challenge his students as they had never been challenged before.

Unlike every other team in the FIRST competition, Dos Pueblos was made up of only seniors, all of whom received academic credit for their participation. They were all robotics rookies, and their season would be the capstone course at the academy where Amir was trying to create a new model for education, one grounded in real-world, project-based, interactive learning. In six weeks he needed to teach this hodgepodge group of kids how to design, machine, construct, wire, and program a robot, while bringing them together as a team for competition. Their success would prove that what he was doing in his academy was working.

Amir was always teaching, and as they drove down Highway 101, he showed Kevin and John how to predict dips in the road. He turned on his brights, pointed out a dark patch of concrete in the middle of the road ahead, and told them to wait. A second later they hit a dip. He explained that after a car hits one, any oil leaked from the engine shakes off onto the pavement. Repeated day after day by thousands of cars, this leaves a large stain on the road after a dip.

"Cool," Kevin said, but what he wanted to talk about was what kind of game Amir expected for this season. When Amir wouldn't dare a guess, Kevin and John joked that it would be some kind of contest where the robots had to swim underwater.

"No way it'll be a water game," Amir said, shaking his head and laughing. Emily sat quietly, suffering from morning sickness but saying nothing because her pregnancy, their first, was still a secret.

As they approached Los Angeles, Amir grew increasingly excited. Yes, he was eager to engage his students in this formative experience. But there was also a part of him, the one that at his age still competed in a head-to-head LEGO-building contest every Christmas with his brother (who had a Ph.D. in experimental physics from MIT), that was personally thrilled about the new engineering challenge ahead. It's finally here, he thought.

As Amir pulled in to the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles for the kickoff event, Gabe Rives-Corbett, a member of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy team, arrived at a salmon-colored office building near Goleta's sparse downtown. A thick coastal fog hung like a pall over the dark streets at that early hour. Gabe, whom some on the team considered their best hope because of his programming skills, was a goofy-looking kid: slightly overweight, with a round face, a mop of unkempt brown hair, a large, dark birthmark on his neck, and a grin that had provocateur written all over it. That grin, however, was nowhere to be seen because Gabe was still half-asleep, having awakened less than a half hour before.

Yawning repeatedly, he lugged his laptop across the parking lot and through the columned entrance of Moseley Associates, a wireless-technology company run by a teammate's father. The place was swank, with marble floors, glass doors, a grand staircase, and high cathedral ceilings. Security cameras followed Gabe as he walked down a corridor and through a set of double doors into a huge, two-story auditorium, where the rest of his team was gathered around a U-shaped table in front of a projection screen. They were a motley bunch of high school seniors: boys, girls, tall, short, big, thin, athletic and not, cool, nerdy, white, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, boisterous, sheepish, striking, plain, hiply dressed, and shapeless in hoodies and sweatpants.

Nobody was saying much, but the nervous energy in the auditorium gave Gabe a jolt. He sat down next to one of his teammates, who said, "This is awesome." As the minutes ticked down for the kickoff webcast to begin, Gabe, a former tae kwon do champion, felt the same tight pit in the bottom of his stomach that he felt when he was about to go into a fight.

Another of his teammates, Anthony Turk, who gave the impression of a teddy bear with his roly-poly form and easy, warm smile, had a different sense: fancy place, a diverse group with different skills assembled, everyone hyped to learn of their improbably complicated mission. "It's like Ocean's Eleven," he said. "And we're about to rob the Bellagio."



On the other side of the country, the sun was already up and a light snow was falling. Those assembled inside the Southern New Hampshire University Field House felt like kids on Christmas morning as they waited for the FIRST Kickoff to begin. Veterans knew there would be a lot of speeches--there was a message to spread--but the game was why most had come in person, to walk the new field, feel the new game...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307588904
ISBN 13 
9780307588906
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780307588890: The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0307588890 ISBN 13:  9780307588890
Verlag: Crown, 2011
Hardcover