I’ve spent this fall working as a parent mentor for a BEST robotics team at my son’s (Corbin) school. The competition was initiated in 1993 by two engineers from Texas Instruments and has grown to nearly 1,000 middle and high school teams across the US. Every year the teams are set a challenge based on a real-world engineering problem, and must design and build a robot in six weeks that addresses the problem.

Last year’s theme was a space elevator, which meant building a robot that could lift tennis balls and 2-liter bottles of liquid ten feet in the air and place them in a receptacle. This year’s theme is called “Gatekeeper “, where the students must build a robot that is capable of grasping 1/2″ diameter wooden dowels and placing them in receptacles, clothes hangers to hang on hooks, and large-scale puzzle pieces into the appropriate places on a slanted base. The three different tasks represent three phases of CPU manufacture: creating logic gates, integrated circuits, and then assembling the CPU.

But only half the competition is focused on building the robot. The other half is about, essentially, marketing: reaching out to the community, showing what the team has done, and explaining to laymen how the robot works and what went into the design. And trust me, that’s much more where I’m spending my time helping out than on actual robot design.

I’m telling you all of this because there has been a lot of noise made lately by the “hacker way ” – throw something out there, test, learn, repeat, all in quick-turn cycles that don’t emphasize quality but focus instead on “getting on the learning curve fast “.

That is not the approach these kids have taken. They broke down the scoring possible for each stage of the game and the strategies required to achieve different objectives. They ran a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the build and game strategies they would use. Instead of assigning controls to each of the four servos that move the robot, they measured the precise moves required for specific key moves and preprogrammed the controls for those moves using RobotC. They ran robot driver practice and measured driver results against their simulations and explored where there were big gaps.

At the same time, on the marketing front, they demo’d their robot to three different groups – an elementary school, a local community college, and a boy scout troupe. They held a community open house event where they invited basically the entire community to come see the robot in action, and view their presentation and exhibit. They wrote news articles and press releases, ran an IndieGoGo, and maintained a website (I take no responsibility for the website’s content or design. I advise. They can choose to ignore my advice, which they do more often than I would like.). They documented their design process and evolution in a 30-page notebook with a 40-page appendix, complete with CAD drawings and the formulas they used for their calculations, as well as a 5-page research paper into the CPU manufacturing industry. They also raised over $3,000 by literally going door to door to retailers and community businesses – and by raising this money, seven kids who were not going to be able to go to the regional competition (which is the week after Thanksgiving in Arkansas for this school) are now able to go.

I have to contrast what this group of kids – none of which is over the age of sixteen – have accomplished, mostly with adult input that consists of advice like, “No, you can’t have people bet on which drivers will score the most points during the open house – that’s gambling and it’s illegal ” against some of the technology evolution put out by adults who are actually getting paid to do the things they do. How, every time I log into Facebook, it has been rearranged somehow. Or, how the latest update to the Pages app on my iPad now inexplicably deletes the spaces between words when I type, effectively rendering the app useless to me. Or, how Paula fielded a question from a reporter, newspaper name redacted to protect the ignorant, that showed a complete lack of understanding about both loss prevention technologies and standard technology implementation practices (this from a reporter that covers retail technology). Or, how I sat in a room at CSCMP and listened to people ask questions about how RFID works that revealed a breath-taking lack of understanding of the technology.

STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math – should never become so obscure or difficult that the principles, at least, can’t be grasped by the masses. And heck, there will always be a place in the world for people like me, who serve the role of translator between business and IT. If I only saw what was happening in the business world these days, I would despair. But in middle school and high school education there appears to be a growing awareness that some basic tech skills have been given short shrift in the past. I think we’re living in the business world realization of that gap – certainly, my generation didn’t have “engineering ” classes in high school, and only the kids destined to service cars went to “shop ” classes. I got a tech education almost despite school, certainly not because of it.

But there’s hope. If these BEST robotics kids are any indicator, there is hope for tech quality in the future. That’s what I tell myself every time my Pages app unhelpfully deletes things I never asked it to delete, and the Apple team says, “There is no glitch. The app is performing as expected. ” I guess we only have to wait the 10 years or so before these kids start making an impact in the workforce. Sigh.