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| Dean Kamen and his Ibot. |
Dean Kamen, the renowned inventor of medical devices, cheered the efforts of 40 high school teams as they competed for the New York Regional title of the FIRST Robotics competition at Columbia last month. Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) to encourage high school students to be as enthusiastic about science and engineering as about sports, and Levien gym provided the perfect location for the engineering equivalent of "March Madness."
Cheerleaders in matching T-shirts and pompoms screamed the names of their teams while music from the PA system provided the background for the announcer's play-by-play. Lights flashed, school mascots pranced, and 5,000 fans in the stands screamed and yelled when their team took to the gym floor.
During two days of competition, students representing schools from as far away as Ithaca and as close as The Bronx guided remote controlled robots that carried oversized black rubber balls up a ramp, scoring points for various feats of maneuvering. The frenzied competition featured ingenious engineering and was a fitting tribute to Kamen's idea that a contest of student-designed and operated robots should be as exciting as a basketball game.
The University, hosting this competition for the first time, became involved last year when Engineering students and staff volunteered to help the robotics team from Morris High School, an inner-city school in the Bronx. This year, the Morris High team placed 11th, but the end result is not the real story. More than 100 students applied for the team (last year there were 30) and the notion of becoming a scientist or engineer has become much more real for the entire student population at Morris.
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| Mechanical Engineering's Bob Stark with the Morris High team and its robot, Pablo |
When not standing on his own two feet during the competition, Kamen often used his Ibot, a six-wheeled robotic system of sensors and gyroscopes, to whip around the auditorium or to raise himself to eye-level height to speak to spectators, members of the press and throngs of well-wishers, sponsors and admirers. He also used it to climb the steps of Low Memorial Library, an easy task for a device that successfully climbed the Eiffel Tower stairs to the restaurant level.
Kamen, who has been an inventor since high school, is well-known for his portable infusion pump for diabetics and portable dialysis machine for kidney patients. He will be the keynote speaker for the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association's awards dinner on Thursday, November 15. By that time, more may be known about his latest brainchild, "IT," code-named "Ginger," the super-secret invention whose importance has been classified in the same league as the development of the World Wide Web and the PC.