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A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts
Crown Publishing Group
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
352 pages ISBN: 0307588890 EAN: 9780307588890 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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