MANCHESTER — It could be a high-tech control room or a theater at NASA, with teams of technical problem-solvers and budding engineers counting down together to race into the unknown.
On Saturday, inside the athletic center at Southern New Hampshire University, roughly 500 students, mentors, industry professionals and family members gathered for Charged Up, the 2023 kickoff of FIRST Robotics, the Manchester-bred robotics Olympics.
Founded in 1989 by local inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, the high school competition is now a worldwide event with as many as 86,000 participants on 3,200 teams.
Teens in brightly colored T-shirts with team names including “Crusaders” and “Overly Complex” waited on chairs and bleachers for the unveiling of this year’s game, a bot-building contest designed to solve a real-world problem: how to bring energy efficiently and affordably to an energy-dependent world.
“Happy kickoff to all our teams!” said Chris Moore, CEO of FIRST Robotics. “The energy is truly electric. I hope the game charges you up to build some extraordinary machines!”
The opening act was an energizer for kids who get a charge out of coding, programming, designing and fabricating machines that are novel, efficient and useful.
“I like to work with my hands and think. It’s a good fusion,” said Alex Boyle, 15, a member of the Crusaders from Manchester Memorial High School, whose interest in engineering was ignited as a child building with Legos. “There’s a lot of people here, which makes me more excited.”
Teams came to SNHU from across New England, New York and Pennsylvania. Those in California, Texas and Florida and scattered across several continents tuned into the live-streamed program.
Samantha LeGallo, 16, of Manchester signed up for Manchester Memorial’s Crusaders her sophomore year. It was a way to test her interest in engineering, she said. “I thought I should start learning the skills and see if I like it.”
What attracts her now is working as a team, “going from a spreadsheet, from ideas in our head, to actually creating a robot and seeing it do well.”
Jaxon Douillard, 18, joined the Crusaders as a freshman interested in computer systems design. “It’s really good workforce training,” he said.
Douillard advises newbies and sideliners who think about trying robotics for the first time in high school: “Just go for it. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is. Everyone is super friendly.”
Saturday’s event was about viewing what their robots would need to accomplish — the start of thinking individually and brainstorming as a group while forging alliances with other teams who may eventually become opponents. The kids will pick up kits including motors, batteries, control system components, construction materials, and a medley of automation components. They get six to eight weeks to design and build, and meet together after school and on weekends. Instructions are limited.
“It’s a major commitment, like a sports team,” said Amanda Bessette, who mentors the Crusaders.
“We’ve designed a sport for the mind,” said Moore. The setting and robot players resemble a video game in real life, designed to spark and sustain interest. “People wouldn’t come if it we called it a science fair.”
On Saturday, Vanessa Hood, 17, of Dunbarton, clutched business cards for her FIRST Robotics team, Ov3Rly KoMpl3X (pronounced ‘Overly Complex’) representing high schoolers from Dunbarton and Bow. This is her 13th year in robotics. FIRST stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.”
She started at age 4 in Junior First Lego League, then progressed over years and levels, and now aspires to a career that combines business and mechanical engineering.
“I liked the fact that I could be part of a team with people interested in the same things,” said Hood “I came out of my shell, and learned skills.”
Kamen and Moore believe America needs a culture shift to celebrate kids interested in science and technology, one that doesn’t deflate them with the labels “geek” and “nerd.”
As kids circled the game floor, their eyes peeled to humans demonstrating what their robots would need to do, Kamen recalled his beginnings growing up in Rockville Center, New York, tinkering in his parents’ basement without any school program remotely like FIRST.
“I wasn’t a very good student. I wanted to think about problems that hadn’t been thought about yet,” he said. Today DEKA, his Manchester-based company, employs roughly 900 engineers. Kamen’s inventions include the insulin pump, the Segway personal transporter, and finely-tuned and dexterous robotic limbs for amputees.
The goal of FIRST is to make STEM as popular as athletics for future generations of students.
Sports are important for kids, said Moore. But in America, most heroes and worshipped role models come from Hollywood, pop music, the NBA or the NFL, he added. Less than half of 1% of youth athletes make it to the pros, while “100% of FIRST athletes make it to the pros, by that I mean a career in science, engineering or technology. Workforce development is so important to us.”
Ensuring equitable access to STEM learning is a priority for the country, he said. FIRST is designed to provide access to STEM learning in rural and underserved communities. Surveys show 6% of scientists and engineers are Black, 7% are Latino, and 28% are female, he added.
“Through our program we unlock potential in young people who don’t know they have it,” said Moore. “We think STEM learning and literacy is equally if not more important than sports. We won’t stop until we have FIRST programs in every school in America.”
“FIRST is a microcosm of what you can do in your life,” Kamen said.
“We’re using robots to build kids. They develop that one muscle that hangs between their ears.”
