The New Cool

December 6, 2010
Forget the football players—teen brainiacs and shop class wizards rule campus in this gripping alternative-sports saga. Journalist Bascomb (The Perfect Mile) follows the seniors of California's Dos Pueblos public school through the 2009 FIRST high school robotics tournament. Their gonzo competition task: build a robot rover that can dump balls into its opponents' baskets while traversing a very slick floor, in a cross between a basketball game and a high-tech medieval mélée played on ice. Under a charismatic, innovative teacher, the D'Penguineers teammates design, manufacture, wire up, and program their mechanical gladiator while studying everything from the physics of friction to the latest CAD software. Bascomb's narrative is an engrossing tutorial in the industrial arts as the students surmount the fiendish engineering challenges of getting their device to move, maneuver, pick up balls, and fire them with uncanny accuracy. But he also gives us plenty of suspense and pathos as the kids endure sleepless nights to finish their gizmo, perform frenzied last-second repairs, and concoct subtle game strategies. The result is an inspiring homage to the spirit of invention and a genuine sports epic, to boot.

December 15, 2010

Imagination, ambition and technology collide at an annual high-school robot-building competition.

Journalist Bascomb (Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi, 2009, etc.) charts the marathon play-by-play teamwork of a group of fourth-year Southern California students from Dos Pueblos High School Engineering Academy as they competed in a robot-building contest. Since 2002, physics teacher and mentor Amir Abo-Shaeer has administered an experimental science curriculum culminating in a team entry in "FIRST" (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a worldwide robotics competition created by Dean Kamen, who lists the Segway among his many groundbreaking inventions. Bascomb incrementally amps up the suspense as he follows the Dos Pueblos D'Penguineers as they quelled interpersonal drama to collectively "embrace their diversity," working through weeks of 16-hour days designing, developing and constructing their most sophisticated yet efficient robot to handle that year's basketball theme. Challenged by the $3,500 raw-material budget, the weight of strict deadlines (robots must be completed in six weeks) and stiff competition (1,686 teams participate), the group was buoyed by the team's "SolidSeven," specific students who were specially pretrained and adept at spatial relationships, mechanism prototyping, electrical design, drive trains, computer programming and basketball shots—all essential to the success of their "PenguinBot." Aside from a mind-numbing plethora of physics terminology, Bascomb skillfully translates the exhilarating challenge to the page via intricately descriptive, expertly paced sketches of the group and their combined handiwork.

A nail-biting thrill ride for techies and armchair engineers.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2010

The FIRST program: a means of boosting techno-smart kids, launched 20 years ago by inventor Dean Kamen. The program highlight: a challenge to design robots from scratch, with head-on competitions in stadiums nationwide. With 250,000 annual competitors, tons of alumni, and interest from film producer Scott Rubin (he's already bought the rights), no wonder best-selling author Bascomb went after this topic. For communities with strong sci-tech interests.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2011
When Dean Kamen, a millionaire inventor, realized that most kids couldnt name a living scientist, he created the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition to encourage high-school students to consider scientific careers. Bascomb follows team 1717, the DPenguineers, from Goleta, California, during the 2009 season. The team of high-school seniors, all rookie robot builders, is led by Amir Abo-Shaeer, a physics teacher and the founder of a fledgling engineering academy. The actual game play and strategy sessions during competitions are undisputedly exciting, but a large chunk of the book is devoted to the six-week robot-building period. Bascomb gamely explains the rules of play and how they apply to construction, but this section may leave readers a bit bored, especially those unfamiliar with the topic. The books movie rights have been snapped up and with good reason: theres a Bad News Bears story here longing to break freea team seemingly divided against itself is pushed to greatness by a visionary leader with an unending stream of life lessons to dispense. An unabashedly feel-good story (once the robot gets built).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)