Woodie C. Flowers SM '68, ME '71, PhD '73

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 3, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We're talking with professor Woodie C. Flowers the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering emeritus at MIT, and father of the wildly popular robotic design competition that started in the Introduction to Design Class 2.70 and is now 2.007. Students are given kits of parts and work in teams to make small robots that go up against each other in a lively playoff at the end of the semester. It quickly became a major phenomenon at MIT, a kind of NCAA basketball championship, but in mechanical engineering.

It has inspired similar competitions around the country and around the world. Students not only have fun, but many credit the class with changing their views of engineering and their life. Professor Flowers won one of the coveted MacVicar Faculty fellowships for his innovative teaching, and is an aggressive advocate of the need to transform education. Woodie, thank you for talking with us today.

FLOWERS: It's great to be here.

INTERVIEWER: Once upon a time young children, and especially boys, grew up tinkering. They built ham radios, they worked on car engines. Did you like to build things when you were growing up?

FLOWERS: I was really lucky. I grew up in a very small town in Louisiana, and both my mother and father were great mentors. My father was the creative mentor. He was a terrible businessman because we were always very very broke; we never owned a house. But his shop was a welding and general repair shop. So dad built things all the time and I worked with him all the time. And everything that dad did was a little different. Part of his ego was doing things that people didn't quite expect. I didn't realize it at the time but later in life I think I figured out that he had a peer review system. Because he would go around town telling people I'm going to take a framit and a widget and make them into the thing- a- ma- jig. And the people in town would say "Abe, you crazy SOB, you can't do that." And then he would go do it and take great pride in peer reviewing it and having everybody say, "Wow, that's really Abe; you did it." So I believe that was one of the seeds for me doing things differently.

And once when I was junior in high school, beginning of my junior year, my uncle gave me a 1947 Dodge four-door sedan, big hulky, black ugly thing. And I drove it home holding both hands on the steering wheel because if I turned it loose it would go straight into the ditch. So I told dad that it's not really worth much to me like that, so I think I want to make a hotrod out of it. And in the way he managed that sort of thing he thought for a minute and said, "Well okay Scooter, if you want to do that I'll help you, but if you start it you gotta finish it." And so that was the commitment, and that's kind of the level of agreement that we had, and so I did.

And there were times when I felt like giving up, but that vehicle, that hotrod roadster, by the time I finished almost nothing of the original car was left. Part of the frame had been shortened a lot, but most everything else was different. It had a big v8 engine and it was a hillbilly hotrod because I couldn't afford chrome. But it was crazy fast and I'm surprised that I was able to use it without killing myself. But learning in that process, I think I learned probably as much engineering as I did in engineering school, because there was a lot of things to do with very limited resources.

INTERVIEWER: Did it spill over into studying science and math in school? Did you find any need to do those or any interest in those subjects?

FLOWERS: My sister was valedictorian of everything that she ever was part of including her college class. So I was the little brother of the academic star. Because of that there was some pressure. Parents never said a word, but self-imposed pressure, but a feeling of insecurity. So I worked hard comparatively. But in the small town in Louisiana in my senior year, I didn't take any books home except for when I was writing a research paper on the abominable snowman, which was kind of fun, but you could do okay; you could make A's without really working that hard.

So in the last part of my senior year, when my social studies teacher noticed that I could not fully extend my left arm because when I'd fallen out of the tree in the second grade and broke it all up, it wasn't exactly set to perfection. So my social studies teacher in the vernacular of the time and place said boy we've got to get you declared a cripple. So he sent me to a hospital 40 miles away and the orthopedic surgeon looked at my elbow and said this boy need some rehabilitation, wrote a letter to the state. State gave me a rehabilitation scholarship. So everybody said college? Opportunity can't turn down. Because we could not afford to send me to college.

And I was going to get a job in oil field and buy a Corvette. Aspirations. So I went off to school and my sister did a good job of helping me balance a feeling that I could probably do it, but knowing that I had to really work hard to make it happen. So worked really hard. And then the next year transferred to an engineering school because mechanical engineering is kind of obvious thing for me to do. And everybody said well you did okay at that other school but this is an engineering school and Louisiana Tech is really hard.

So I was again balancing insecurity and I worked really hard. And by the time I was about to graduate, I was thinking I can buy a Corvette and get a job. And I'm back to interviewing in the oil field and other friends were getting job offers. It seemed really great and then my department head call me in and Dr. Thigpin said, "Have you applied to graduate school?" And I said what? He said, "You should." And I did, and somehow I got accepted to MIT. Everybody said opportunity you can't turn down. Off to MIT.

And I arrived here, and you can guess what the story was. You did okay at Louisiana Tech but this is the big time; this is really going to be hard. So I was balancing and I worked really hard. And as I was finishing my Master's degree, Bob Mann called me in and said have you signed up for the qualifier's exam? And I said what? He said you should. And I did, and somehow I passed the qualifier's exam. And everybody said PhD at MIT, et cetera. Same thing happened with regard to becoming a faculty member. There was a slot and the senior faculty said if you want to take the job then we'll make a decision over the weekend. So everybody said faculty at MIT. And that kept happening; I never got a Corvette -- I drive a truck.

INTERVIEWER: When you were growing clearly some of your mechanical tinkering came from your family. Were your friends doing things like that? Did they come into the shop with you, or were you pretty much separate from them?

FLOWERS: Some did. One of my very good friends had a very souped up car that I actually used once to elope my best friend. We had to get to Marshall, Texas and back in an eight-hour period. So having this moonshine running car, which is literally what it was, made that possible. It was a dramatic trip.

But I also was an odd mix because I was a boy scout; I was an eagle scout. By the time I was 12 or something early -- I can't remember when you make the transition -- but I was an eagle as a boy scout before became an explorer. And I collected butterflies and did science fair projects, and so there was a strange mix. And I played football -- not very well -- but I played football. And I think that was a good thing for me because I didn't fit in a particular slot, and I've always enjoyed that feeling.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever think of becoming an entomologist?

FLOWERS: A little, but not nearly as much. I like things that go clunk and bang.

INTERVIEWER: Do young children today do as much clunking and banging as children your generation did?

FLOWERS: Not as much. One of the reasons that I spend a huge amount of time with FIRST, for expression of recognition of science and technology, is because it provides an opportunity for our kids to get involved with hands-on things. And I believe at an academic level, Wilson's book The Hand, is a very elegant argument that says this and this evolve together, and they work together and they help each other. I believe that.

There's also a recent book The Last Child in the Woods which talks about the fact that most of the things that I've learned a lot from are illegal now. The model rockets that we did -- because my father had a welding shop -- our rockets were metal and big and heavy, and we couldn't find the materials to make the fuels that you read about in the magazine. But we discovered, kind of accidentally, one of the formulas was sulphur 25 percent powdered zinc and 75 percent sulfur. We couldn't find powdered zinc.

But one of my friends worked in the oil field and his father had paint cans that were this much paint, and then another can was powdered lead; really heavy stuff. Terrible to handle but I inhaled a lot of it. We mixed 50/50 -- powdered lead and sulfur -- and it wouldn't burn, it wouldn't burn. It would just make this terrible gas that was terrible to inhale. And I got frustrated and struck a match and stuck it in. And I came out of my little workshop behind our house -- all white -- and so we had rocket fuel.

We then made rockets that were big. And when we carried them to the launch pad they were really heavy. So our rockets didn't do like ST rockets; ours were more Saturn 5 things. This huge billowing thing happened and it took off. And there again, I was lucky that we didn't do something that injured someone in that process. That's the only time in high school I've ever been called into the principal's office because the rumor went around town that those guys are doing these rockets and they don't even know where there coming down. And we didn't. They would go far enough that we'd never see them again.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever have students these days who simply don't know where to start in making a robot from a motor and a bunch of gears and springs and pieces of plastic and wooden metal because they come in and they've just never done that? Or do the ones who come into mechanical engineering tend to have done things like this in some way?

FLOWERS: Have to be careful and not talk about hands-on experience and kids today in three-hour chunk. But one quick story that kind of makes the point. Students have lived in a virtual world. Students at MIT are incredibly smart. They jump through every hoop that's been held up in front of them, so it's not their fault but just society has directed them in different ways.

In our senior design course, one of the really elegant students who happened to be the leader of her group -- they had divided up some task and she had accepted the one of finding out whether a piece of reinforcement steel rebar could be bent into a tight loop and serve as a bearing. She came into lab and I was there early, and she had a slightly bent piece of rebar. It had been heated -- you could tell that it had been hot, and she was going to report that she really can't do that; it just kind of doesn't work.

I said we got a few minutes. Why don't we go out in the lab and try some stuff. So we went out in the lab and I found another big steel bar and I found the biggest vice I could find. And I cranked down the rebar against the piece of steel that I was going to wrap it around. And I took a four-pound sledgehammer and I climbed up on top of the bench and I was going wham, wham.

My father had a blacksmith pit, so that was familiar to me. So I wrapped it around, made a fine bearing. And as I finish kind of the last blow, I looked up and three of the best students in the class -- really sharp people -- were standing there with their jaw open. I wasn't behaving like a professor, and they'd never seen anyone hit a piece of steel hard enough to just mold it. So that visceral understanding of the behavior of mechanics is really important. And it doesn't fall out of the sky and it certainly doesn't come out of a textbook; comes through real interaction. I believe I had been so lucky because when I encountered Castiglione's theorem about deflection of materials, it kind of made sense. And I have a basis for saying you know, that's about right, or not.

INTERVIEWER: So what happens if there isn't a Woodie Flowers in the lab?

FLOWERS: I believe it's very important that we rebalance education. I'm not saying go back in anyway; I'm saying let's readjust. Because the beautiful news is that we have these incredibly powerful tools that are analytical tools that are so easy to use; they get really good answers. But they can also be just a magnitude because of us typing error, and if you don't recognize that, that's dangerous. So that powerful tool should be augmented by the wisdom that comes from understanding things in a way that helps you recognize -- ugh, that's not even close.

INTERVIEWER: Well just to take that example that you were given, if you don't have that person who's grown up with a blacksmith shop in the backyard or nearby, how do you recreate that experience? Even if you set aside some hands-on type labs, if you don't have that people who've had that experience to be the mentors, teachers, advisors, are the students going to manage to replicate that type of experience? If it's doable.

FLOWERS: This may be a big out of the box assertion but I don't think it's the responsibility of just the universities to educate people. We have in this country, and we better not lose, a connection to people who do have that visceral understanding that you just conveyed. So I'm personally devoted to the notion that it's not about lecturing at, it's about working with. And mentorship and/or apprenticeship are things that are really sophisticated; things that we should worship. And

MIT graduates, for example, have an obligation to give back, and they know a lot of that stuff. So whatever we do, we need a system that does pull out of society those resources and make sure that that stuff happens. And I believe that we can find the room or the space or the time or the resources to do that by exporting the training piece of education. The codified learned calculus stuff shouldn't be done with two people working together, that can be done with a screen. And learning to think using calculus is something that you do with another person.

So the model of education that I believe in is the one that MIT does so beautifully through UROP and through design courses in mechanical engineering and through the doctoral student/professor relationship; that is a beautiful educational. And in that model, for example, the supervisor might say go learn the code to run this program, to do this analysis. Go train yourself. And in a career, you better know how to go train yourself. But in our education system up until the graduate school, we have this notion that we have to kind of lead students step by step through training process. We filter for students who actually accept passive learning. What we really want is the best students are the ones that say I need to know that. I'll go learn that stuff and then I'll come back and find this opportunity to work with an expert and become more educated.

INTERVIEWER: But do you think there are enough people in our society with the practical resources, so-to-speak, to keep in the system or build into the system somehow, such that it gets passed along; the kinds of skills you're talking.

FLOWERS: And I think we have to return. It's an old fashioned notion that agriculture, mining, and manufacturing are the only sources of real wealth. Economists kind of chuckle and don't want to ask questions about that. But I believe that as we look at what's happening in the world economy, we do begin to see that all currencies is potentially a ponzi scheme. And if there's nothing to back it, if you can't exchange it for something at some point, it's value is diluted.

I

believe in the last few years we've seen a major part of the economy that was just associated with the world; there was a nonproductive activity that drew a heavy tax from the system. Here again, I'm not saying we should go back, but I believe innovative new products that actually involved touching things and understanding complex systems Et cetera, will be the source of whatever real wealth we are able to get. INTERVIEWER: Let's go back to the design contest itself and how it was born, how it evolved and you're roll in it. You weren't even a professor yet.

FLOWERS: That's right. In about 1970, I became the engineering projects laboratory coordinator. Actually I was an instructor, which at that time was a faculty position. So my faculty appointment record goes back further than usual. INTERVIEWER: And you had your doctorate already or no?

FLOWERS: I did not have a doctorate. It was an oddity the way the records were kept at that time, I guess. But, in that role, the engineering projects laboratory was an innovation that was primarily driven by professor Robert W. Mann, and it was part of the mechanical engineering department. We put out an annual report and we gave seminars and things like that. I was to help make that all happen. But in addition, I was used as a kind of glorified teaching assistant in the design course.

And the first year I was involved, Herb Richardson, who later became the department head of mechanical engineering, was in charge of the first design course. It had a different number then from 2.70 then but it became 2.70, and he had heard about Xerox Corporation doing something called giving employees something called a creativity kit to stimulate their creative juices. So we did that. So we had a brown bag of stuff. And we gave it to the students and said make something useful. And it was an odd mix of pieces boss wood, paper clips and things of that sort.

My officemate, Don Margolis, and I were both helping with the course then, and we made the observation that the students really struggled with deciding what to make. That part of the exercise was really really difficult. And I think ultimately I believe that one of the most sophisticated things a designer ever does is decide what to design. If you want to learn about you and the design process, it's probably a good idea to say here's what you're designing and here's some stuff to do it. So constrain the problem and as you become a more sophisticated designer, you just peel off constraints. And then the final very wise designer has no constraints and decides what problem to tackle.

But what we suggested, what Don Margolis and I suggested, is next year let's give them the kit of materials but let's define the problem. And so I was involved to get the next year of this course the next year. And we said build a machine that will move down a 30-degree slope three feet in three minutes. And the criterion for excellence is how close to three minutes you get, so their building clocks. And that was in the first 2.70 competition, and it was good. When you look at the pictures of it that's a fascinating machine.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you make a contest? In other words you could just said design a machine that does X that moves down a slope, and then simply say it does or it does it well, it doesn't do it.

FLOWERS: I can't pretend that I remember the mental process, but I can tell you what I think about that. Students always compete. We always want to know how well other people are doing. If you say we're going to use this as a criterion, and by the way, that's not what your grade is about, but whether or not you do something purposeful is what you're grade is about. And by the way, if you help each other you'll probably learn a lot.

So early on with some of the ways that we structured things, we laid the groundwork for what I later started calling gracious professionalism, which is an umbrella term that had to do with competing like crazy but treating each other nicely and helping each other in the process. It turns out that really works. We do we humans like that. And in particular if the competition -- it doesn't have to be like reality TV today. You're not trying to focus on the tear forming in somebody's eye because they've been ridiculed. It was humiliation free, gracious competition. And you'd also have the right to say to your instructor look, I don't want to make a clock, I want to make this thing that goes zipping down, stops, and then celebrates.

So as long as you did something that was interesting and did it well, then you could do well in the course. So competition doesn't have to be malicious competition, it can be gracious competition, and that's the way that was set up and got started. And students at MIT embraced that notion, by the way, and as the years progressed it became more and more the tradition.

INTERVIEWER: Do you like contests yourself?

FLOWERS: I don't know. I'm not sure.

INTERVIEWER: How many students, roughly, were in this course?

FLOWERS: In the first one there were probably 24, something like that.

INTERVIEWER: Not very many.

FLOWERS: Not very many. At its peak 220 or 230 people would show up on the first day, and I think we probably have given as many as 200 grades.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have idea when you were staring out that it would become so popular?

FLOWERS: Absolutely not. I was just doing what seemed like the right thing to do. And I stumbled into -- I love designing things and to go to sleep at night I pick something to design and work on it because that's kind of my meditation. It also turned out that I guess my fascination with design was a bit infectious, and I liked getting other people hooked. And that ended up -- I talk about teaching but I don't think it's really teaching, I think it's helping other people learn. And saying that you're teaching implies a push, and I think a pull is a better way to think about it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you still go to sleep thinking about designing something?

FLOWERS: Absolutely. Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: What are some of the ones you've thought about recently?

FLOWERS: Last night -- my wife and I, are going on a nature photography trip to Costa Rica and I'm trying some new ways to do macro photography, and I want versatile arms that hold two strobes out to the side of the camera, et cetera. So, that mechanism is evolving in my head and I have a mockup, and I've learned, so.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever find you're not falling asleep because you're getting so excited about the design progressing?

FLOWERS: Most of the time when I don't fall asleep it's because I lose track of design and start looking at the list of things that I should be doing.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think made the course so popular and the contest?

FLOWERS: Well, I worked hard at the course. It seems obvious that if you are responsible for -- I feel very strongly about creativity, perhaps because of my father's influence. But once you take a job, the chances that you will have to reinforce your own creative self-image is pretty slim. Because the stakes get to be really high, so you pick conservative's path. While you're a student you have a safe opportunity to learn about your ability to be creative. And people have often asked me well, do you think you can teach creativity? I don't want to be part of that debate. I don't care what the answer to that question is. I do firmly believe that you can create an environment in which people can learn about their own creativity, and you can certainly teach people to double or triple or quadruple the number of ideas they can have in a short time.

So you can get people out of the "you must find the answer" into the "let's think about lots of ways to do this" and then winnow down. So, one of the things that I think was wonderful about the course 2.70 was that a lot of people came to understand that they could do something that they didn't think they could do. And a lot of, in particular, women in the course had never built a thing. And when you build a thing that will over there kind of do what you told it to do, I believe there's a feeling of attachment of birthing or something if you've created something in a completely unambiguous way.

Some of the other things that were part of the course were -- Bill Verplank was a fellow graduate student at the time and Bill had spent time at Stanford and helped with their visual thinking course. And he taught me about some of the things that they've been teaching, so I pulled from Bill some of that stuff and modified it and brought it into the course.

INTERVIEWER: Is that best?

FLOWERS: Well, sketching for one, I had a 10 or 12-lecture series on sketching. Most people don't think they can draw; that's almost always wrong. One can learn to sketch remarkably effectively in a remarkably short time. So one of the things that was great to me was to be able to watch students -- one of the assignments I would often give them was draw your room. And I would give them a way to do it; one point perspective way to do the converges, all that stuff kind of falls out. It's incredibly out of rhythmic.

I had a minor in art. I took drawing from art instructors. They don't do what I would do. I didn't say draw what you see or feel, I said do this construction, and then after that you can start being an artist. But they would draw their room and be really proud of it, and they would send it to their parents. I did this. So in several ways students were able to do things that they never been able to do before and they were tangible things that they could talk to other people about. In some cases I think I could help them learn to see.

When one of the exercises, for example, was I would say draw a grasshopper. And by the way, in the course, even when there were 200 people, when they came to "lecture" they knew that I was going to be down front doing things with the blackboard and stuff. But they also knew that they were all going to be doing things too. So outside the room, if there were five stacks of white paper, they took one out of each stack because they knew there were going to be five things they were going to do to hand in. And they handed in stuff at the end, so there's always involvement. So I would say draw a grasshopper. And you can watch students go [SLAPPING SOUND] -- I don't know what a grasshopper looks like. And so they would draw Jiminy Cricket was the dominant thing. And then I would go to the blackboard and I would draw a grasshopper, which I would have carefully rehearsed, and I would say I'm going to draw a grasshopper. And I have a huge advantage because I've looked at a grasshopper recently and I know, for example, that the thorax is shaped roughly like this, and the overall shape is roughly this, and they have six legs, and their eyes are actually above the antenna, it's not below.

So I would talk through every line that I put on the board. Then the next time they came to class the first thing I would say was drawn a grasshopper. Huge improve in grasshoppers. So I would then say look, you did better this time because if you were studying Robert Frost's portrait, you would carefully read the portrait. If you're going to use things in design you must look at the thing. And then quite often I would then follow up, but.

We handed out kits. They had motors in the kits. Everybody now draw your motor to scale, putting all the details that are there. Phenomenal correlation between people who had look carefully at their motor and knew contacts were here, and the shaft was here, and it's about this long in diameter. If they had seen it and could render it, they were empowered to use it. If they hadn't then I'd say go pick up your motor and talk yourself through every bit of it. Look at everything in your kit because if you know it in that way, you will be able to use it much more effectively.

INTERVIEWER: Did the mechanical engineering department or MIT or you ever try to measure how much better, if at all, the students who had come through this design course were in their other courses afterwards? In other words, did it play into their other classwork after they took this class?

FLOWERS: Not in a methodical way. It would be a really interesting study, I'm sure. But first approximation, if you just looked at people's ability to sketch something, it was a big difference. If you ask them about their ability to drill a hole where they thought it oughta be, it would be a big difference. There were lots of skills that one could assess.

INTERVIEWER: Right. It depends what payoff you're trying to capture. Did the contest run smoothly from the beginning? Did you run into any obstacles?

FLOWERS: It was generally -- I'm proud of the way it ran. I think that I'm somewhat of a fanatic about details like that, and I think that we were making a deal. One part of the deal, by the way, is that if you did this economically not solid, but interesting assessment -- I would always put on the blackboard at the beginning of the class how much the students had paid to take the class. And that's not quite right. I just take the portion of what it cost to be at MIT for a year, and that number would end up being $300,000 or $400,000; a lot money. So I would say that's a lot of money. You guys have paid a bundle to do this. So, here's the deal, we're going to try hard to make it worth it, but you should stop trying hard to take advantage of it.

Another thing occasionally I would do is as students came in class I would give them a ticket that had a price on it for that "lecture" that day. And it was what you'd pay, and that number would be $45 or some number like that. I don't think it's fair to a large group of students who have given a chunk of their life and some of their parents' money to not try to make sure that stuff works. And making a big mistake in the way a design competition is stated is a serious mistake. And I would try really hard to, when I was trying to fashion these things, to make sure it was a whole group of criteria.

One distinction I'd like to make -- in the beginning when we first started doing this and people's faculty at other the schools would ask about -- quite often people would say you know I have this great idea and I don't know whether it's possible, but I gave it to the students as a creative exercise. I'd say that's pedagogically criminal. Why would you ever do that? You've got a very small chance in making sure that people regard themselves as creative and you're going to potentially give them something that can't be done?

So we would try very hard to fashion competitions in which you would never sort the class into what's able to and not able to. You always wanted gradations of success and an idea where everyone was able to do it -- some better than others. You also want to try very hard to make sure that there is not one killer way to do it. That's horrendously complex because if everybody recognizes that and they try to make this really complex thing and it doesn't work, that's not good for their image either.

So we tried to do what I call ambivalent scaling so that the faculty, staff, working on the course, would be ambivalent about whether you'd like to make an arm that reaches or a car that runs over. So you'd try to make the trade offs very subtle and difficult. I actually tried to make sure that the competition was not fair. Because if you set out to say this is a fair competition -- we're going to find out who's best -- that's not the right environment for a creative exercise. So there were always lots of places for egos to hide -- yeah did okay but you know, I happen to run up against the guy who had the right -- and it was all right. And that was the spirit.

And I really loved seeing 19 year old males give each other hug after a round of competition in which one had beaten another. And I think that spirit is a major part of what made the course complex. So, fun, hardest fun they've ever had. Worked really hard long hours, complicated things, lots of thoughts about strategy, et cetera, but the competition itself was more of a celebration than a competition. So it was a big party that celebrated what had happened up to that point.

And things like one year a student was trying to make their poxy dry really quickly, and they put it in the oven. And so when their name came up they put a pile ashes down on the starting plate. Because we said the deadline is completely unevading. When I first started working with the course, by the way, the course would give about half incompletes. Students would have these design projects they wouldn't finish. I said wait a minute let's do this thing and end it. And the number of incompletes went to essentially zero because it was over then, and you couldn't go back and revisit.

INTERVIEWER: So they got some credit for their ashes?

INTERVIEWER: Sure. Sure. By the way part of the in the design courses we typically have more information about what students have done then you ever did in electrical course that had three grades and a final. You've got lots of contact over time. You've actually become familiar with how students make decisions.

INTERVIEWER: Because you're in the lab with them or because they --

FLOWERS: Working with. Working with.

INTERVIEWER: -- And it seemed like there were two different pieces of the design itself you were presenting them with. One was the go up a slope or down a slope that's 30 degrees and it does whatever. But then you called them things like the mouse trap or the watergator or the volcano. How did you and your colleagues figure out what you wanted these things to do and then come up with a name?

FLOWERS: When I was designing the competitions and naming them, several of my colleagues decided that I came up with a name and then tried to fit or find a contest-- because for me they were always a pun of some kind. A couple moments of truth was about a teeter totter, well a couple moments. The thing of the mountain was a thing that went to the top of the mountain and a tug of war. But the thing that goes into thinking about a competition are dear to my heart. Because night before last I went to sleep trying to think about next year's first robotic competition. And there are hard problems. You try to do all those things that I mentioned earlier, possible, possible in many ways, possible in ways that allow you to see gradations different than last year. Maybe allow some analysis but is not dominated by; a real mix of things, and it's a good creative exercise to keep the professor honest.

INTERVIEWER: And then you have to figure out what parts are necessary and do throw in extra parts?

FLOWERS: Well, when we first started doing 2.70 the rule was that everything had to come out of the kit. And to be kind of wise one year we put a peanut in the kit and we thought what will they do with that? One of the students very quickly figured out that peanut oil is a great lubricant. So he squeezed the peanut, got the oil and lubricated parts of the thing.

Things got a bit looser later with regard to what's used in the kit, and now it's really quite wonderful because rather than cutting out intricate parts with scalpels and coping saws, they can use laser cutters and waterjet cutters and really elegant things. I think that's great. I think that the rapid prototyping world has pulled all of that stuff much further along.

INTERVIEWER: Does that make it even harder for them or --

FLOWERS: No I think it allows them -- there was a time when manual skill was really really dominant issue in the competition. A lot of people would have really good ideas but they couldn't quite get the. The people that did well were the ones that had a good strategy, the good idea, and had the execution skills to make it happen. Now some machines and computers can help you with the acute using skill. Still means you have to have good strategy, good ideas, et cetera.

INTERVIEWER: So do you and your assistants or colleagues take these kids and then sort of go up against each other before the class starts to see --

FLOWERS: I haven't been associate with that course in quite a long time. But a relevant story -- the first year, the 30 degrees slope -- I at that time had keys to the student shop, so I stayed up all night the night before the contest and built one myself. I still have it. It was a classical clock. It had an escapement and in order to make the escapement work, there was a small paper clip in the kit. And I needed a very effective bearing in the escapement. So I drilled an axial hole down the center of the paper clip wire and put this little fine piece of piano wire that was in it through that to make a bearing. So I did this. And doing that on the old student shop where surplus lays was quite a challenge.

But, when I tested my machine, it really worked and it was tunable and it was a torsional pendulum. After the students finished their competition and John Purbrick won with three runs that were within a couple of seconds of three minutes each time; quite amazing. I put my machine up there and I was going to show how did the instructor do. It went sliding down the ramp because we had sand in the kit as ballast. The ramp was covered with sand by the end of the competition. My machine wouldn't stay. When I adjusted it, it was a nice clean ramp and I think that was the perfect outcome, because the instructor's machine didn't work. And that was exactly the way it should have been. But it is really important that when you design a competition that you run the movie in your head and as many ways as you possibly can, and you have to be fairly close to right.

INTERVIEWER: But just in your head? In other words, you didn't do trial runs with the kit before you handed the out?

FLOWERS: Try to do some critical experiments. You must know what's important. It's not fair to the group to miss a big thing.

INTERVIEWER: Were you ever truly surprised by any results that students came up with?

FLOWERS: Sure. Sure. You'd be horribly disappointed if you weren't surprised by some the results. It'd be really sad if you got surprised by something that negated the competition, for example, if there was a big hole.

INTERVIEWER: Did that ever happen?

FLOWERS: No. We made some mistakes but never, never a killer mistake. And there was always a supreme court that would adjudicate questions about rules sometimes, and you want to really not change things; you want to leave things as they were stated. Because people start down a path and if you change a rule that is really unfair. One of the years, one of the things that we thought about that turned out to be really effective was that there were two machines on opposite ends and they were grabbing a peg and putting it in a whole -- it was a square peg and a round hole. One of the machines that ended up being quite outstanding started by firing a little projectile that knocked the other peg out of the grasp of the opponent. So we thought maybe somebody will do that but it would be really hard. But this guy did it really well, over and over. It was good.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how many other colleges or schools do something similar at this point?

FLOWERS: There was a time when it seemed like they were just everywhere, and they're still variance in lots of places. One of the things that was quite amazing for me was that after -- back up and tell you about it's important to put into context how 2.70 became well known. When I took over the course I had been a helper in the course and then became a faculty member and was teaching sections, but I would still be very much involved in designing the competition.

When I became instructor in charge, one of the first things I did was ban media coverage because quite often the local TV stations would send a crew. They'd show up with someone who didn't know or didn't care about what was really happening. They would be invasive in getting some shots. It would go back and there would be fifteen seconds on the local evening news, and the anchor and the co- anchor would both chuckle knowingly about those nerds at MIT. What are they up to next? That was a lose, lose, lose. No one had any idea what was really going on, and it was just making fun of.

So I said just stop. I asked the news office don't tell them that we're doing it. So after I'd done it for a while, more people had come to know about it. And there'd be fire code problems with the number of people in the room where we had the competition because there were too many people there. So folks from Discover: The World of Science came and said we'd like to cover the competition and I said no thank you. They were kind of shocked. I said we just don't need that kind of publicity. So they went back and then the proprietors of the company that was a producing company for Discover: The World of Science came and sat down, and we had a long conversation. They said we want to do a 14 minute piece that's really serious about the pedagogic theory behind this stuff; we want to understand what you're doing. I said okay. Write a letter to the students, tell them what you want to do, I'll let them vote and they can decide. They voted to say yes. And Joe Blatt was a producer of that first segment, and he did an outstanding job. It was just a beautiful job about 2.70. So that started a series of those and then that was --

INTERVIEWER:

About what year, roughly? Mid- '70s?

FLOWERS: -- No, that's probably mid- '80s. Discover: The World of Science ended and Scientific American Frontiers was the following program and that was the reason I was a host of Scientific American iFrontiers/i for the first three years of that program, because we got to know each other a lot. And Japanese version of PBS took all of those programs and put them together into either a one hour or two hour -- a big special. That was a really popular program in Japan.

I went to Tokyo several times to be guest at competitions that were run by Mytech Corporation and others. People would recognize me on the street in Tokyo as the guy from MIT who does those. So in the United States there were many versions, but in the rest of the world some were really ubiquitous, and a major part of Japanese education got focused on that stuff for awhile. Obviously Japan is still really dedicated to the idea of robotics competition. What does it take to win a contest? How much is design savvy and knowledge? How much is luck?

FLOWERS: All the above. As I said earlier we really tried to make sure that luck was important in winning, because it depended on who your opponents were, things of that sort. But it's a great lesson in you had to do a whole series of things right. One of the things that students often thought at the beginning was the person that had the great idea was going to be the winner and so some students would try to keep their great idea a secret. We would say that's fine, you don't have to disclosure your idea. You would need to talk your instructor about it, instructor would keep it quiet.