Outside Innovation

See FIRST in Action Today & Tomorrow in Boston!

For those of you in the Boston/New England area, you have an opportunity to experience firsthand what a FIRST challenge looks like and to experience its gracious professionalism first-hand.

The 2014 New England FIRST Robotics Competition Region Championship (Qualifying Championship) Boston is this weekend...April 11/12 – The opening ceremony is TODAY, Friday, April 11^th, starting at 8:30 a.m. at the Boston University Agganis Arena. The final matches and the closing ceremony takes place tomorrow, Saturday, April 12^th.

You’ll find the event details on the New England FIRST website.

Google App Inventor: Right Idea; Missing “Do What I Do” Feature

I was excited to hear about the advent of Google App Inventor for Android—an environment that makes it easy for non-programmers to create apps for their mobile phones. I'm still waiting to get my hands on it since it's being rolled out for educators and students only.

Since the mid-1970s I've been a fan of application development tools that end-users can use to roll their own applications. I have long contended that if you really want your application environment to take off, you need to empower end-users to invent and create their own applications. I learned this from watching the evolution of early word processing systems in the mid-70s. CPT was one of the first companies to make it easy for users to automate processes by storing a complicated series of keystrokes, recording these as macros, and then letting the user abstract that recorded code into reusable chunks of logic with if/then logic.

Wang Labs and Digital Equipment also implemented similar capabilities in their word processing systems. Power users—the smart people (mostly women) who produced most of the documents for their companies at that time—quickly developed lots of time-saving and ingenious programs that both automated and transformed their work.

Google App Inventor uses a different approach—a set of graphical building blocks, based on the evolution of the work of Seymour Papert's Logo language at MIT. [Another evolution of Papert's work led to the LEGO Mindstorms' NXT User Interface by National Instruments for a child-friendly and scientist-friendly version of LabView—a sophisticated parallel programming environment designed for sensing and controlling inputs and outputs—which I describe in this chapter of Outside Innovation.]

Here's the KittyPurr video demo of App Inventor for Android:

I am bullish about the Android App Inventor—not because I think that it will generate tens of thousands of killer apps that will give the iPhone app ecosystem a run for their money, but because I like the end-user empowerment that it unleashes. What I wish is that someone would also create a "do what I do" keystroke capture/macro creator for Android (and iPhone) apps that you could then edit and refine using either this building block approach and/or a simple scripting language, as with the word processors of yore.

Here's a video from Google's visiting professors who apparently contributed to the genesis of App Inventor for Android with a bit more background on their thinking.

LEGO Celebrates the 10th Anniversary of LEGO Mindstorms’ and FIRST LEGO League: Building a Culture of Customer Engagement

LEGO executives celebrated the 10th anniversary of their successful MINDSTORMS robotics kit at the FIRST Championship in Atlanta. Soren Lund, Lego’s Sr. Marketing Director for product and marketing development, joined our Visionaries’ meeting to discuss some of his learnings from 10 years of customer engagement. In talking about the cultural challenges of opening up both your product development and your online presence to customer participation, Soren expressed it this way:

"Like every large company, Lego has a "must" culture - you must do this; the open source developer community has a 'can' culture - I do this because I want to, because I can. The value of the outside-in model is that it brings a different culture inside your company."

Soren Lund at the LEGO booth at FIRST.

“As we launched Mindstorms,” Soren explained, “we thought, wouldn’t it be great if people actually talked about this. So we built a Web community and encouraged customers to engage. It wasn’t a mass marketing thing—we’ll tell you what to think. We wanted people to be able to write about what they thought of Mindstorms, etc. We should listen to our consumers. Corporate didn’t want to do that—they were worried about negative content. We did it anyway and were flooded. We were really excited about the response.”

Girl Scouts Team Up with FIRST

I was delighted that one of the BIG announcements at this year’s FIRST Championship was a new partnership between the Girl Scouts of America and FIRST. Every Girl Scout troop will now be supported and encouraged to form a robotics team. The young women on the Girl Scout’s existing teams will be tapped as mentors. There are already close to 100 Girl Scout FIRST LEGO League programs around the country to date. Two high-school-level Girl Scout teams competed in the World Championship finals in Atlanta.

Emily Tweaks Her Team’s Robot

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Emily Stephens, a senior at Perry Meridian High School in Indianapolis, tweaks the team's robot at the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition—the team was a finalist for the Autodesk Inventor award.

 

Corporate Execs Learn from FIRST How to Inspire Young Inventors and to Harness Their Creativity

In mid-April, we held our semi-annual Visionaries’ meeting in Atlanta where we witnessed the preliminary day of the FIRST robotics championship. Our goal was to wrap our minds around our next-gen customers and employees and to absorb some creative energy from these bright kids. But our visit exceeded my expectations. By spending time to understand the structure of the design of this very successful program to inspire kids to engage in science, technology, engineering, and math, I think we discovered some principles that could be transferred into our corporate environments to make innovation a more repeatable and systemic activity.

Thunderchickens Competing in the Final Round

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Team 217, “ThunderChickens” of Utica Community Schools from Sterling Heights, Michigan, maneuver their winning robot, which would eventually reign victorious as part of the 2008 FIRST Robotics Championship winning alliance.

Some of the key take-aways:

• Make sure that people are working on intellectually HARD problems.

• Have them work in teams on the same problem.

• Give them incentives to share and cooperate with other teams.

• Build in real-world, real-time feedback and lots of iterations.

Here’s a link to the full report and pictures from the event.

A Team Controls Its Robot via Remote Control

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Team 868’s robot from Carmel High School in Indiana in the midst of the challenge. The robot is successfully herding a 40 inch. ball around the track. Its next feat will be to lift the ball 6 feet in the air and throw it over the overpass and then collect it again.

Seymour Papert is Critically Injured!

I was dismayed to see this article in today's Boston Globe,  MIT Scientist listed as Critical after Brain Surgery in Hanoi. Seymour Papert was run into by a speeding motorbike as he crossed the street in Hanoi and underwent brain surgery last night. My thoughts and best wishes for a miraculous recovery are with Seymour and his family.

Seymour is the father of customer-led innovation in early childhood education. He is a pioneer in applied Artificial Intelligence. Among other accomplishments, Dr. Papert and his team of grad students at MIT invented the LOGO programming language for kids to use and the first child-powered robots--the forerunners of the LEGO Mindstorms product.

Our prayers are with Seymour and his family!