The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts
Neal Bascomb, "The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts"
English | ISBN: 0307588890 | 2011 | 337 pages | EPUB | 5 MB
English | ISBN: 0307588890 | 2011 | 337 pages | EPUB | 5 MB
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
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