Glenn Lee punted when asked if robots will take over the world, but if they ever do, many of the students he works with at Waialua High and Intermediate School might be among those who help make that happen.
Since 2003, Lee has been the lead teacher and coordinator for the school’s robotics program, which in 1999 was the first of its kind to be officially organized in Hawaii and has performed well in student robotics competitions worldwide ever since.
In fact, the Waialua program was selected in 2011 for the FIRST Robotics Competition “Hall of Fame” Chairman’s Award. This year nearly 50 students are participating in the program, out of a student body of about 620.
FIRST — “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” — was founded in 1989 by Segway inventor Dean Kamen and is funded by thousands of donors, including many large technology-related corporations.
Lee said the other major robotics competition organization is VEX (“It’s not an acronym for anything”) presented by the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation. Its latest world championship was last week in Louisville, Ky.; the Waialua team got as far as the quarterfinals.
Since Wednesday and through Saturday of this week, Lee’s students are in St. Louis, Mo., where they are again competing in a FIRST world competition, along with 20,000 other students representing 900 teams from 39 countries.
Lee emphasized that none of the work or travel required of the Waialua program to attend these competitions could be possible without the help of its many local mentors and sponsors.
One key fundraising event is a luau and silent auction held annually at Dole Plantation. It has raised more than $80,000 since 2007, and this year is set for May 12.
Lee, 45, was born and raised in Wahiawa. He is a graduate of Leilehua High School, plus has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in business administration, both from the University of Hawaii.
These days he lives in Royal Kunia with his wife, Auria, and their two young daughters, one of whom is 7 years old and the other 8 months.
Question: We’re talking mostly about robots here, right? I mean, like what kind of robots? Humanoid robots? Machines that walk up the wall? Or what?
Answer: Every year there’s a different challenge at the competitions. We’ve had some robots in the past that could shoot Frisbees. I’m talking four Frisbees in 1-1/2 seconds. We have robots that can shoot basketballs. There was a basketball game one year and I always joke around that our robot could compete even against a professional basketball player — let’s say Steph Curry — and make more shots than he could per 100 attempts.
Q: In these contests, how do the judges determine who should be the winners?
A: Well, there are two types of awards. There’s one for winning the actual competition, and that’s not something that a judge could determine. I mean, if you score more points in every match and you win in the finals, you win the tournament.
Q: You mean like shooting basketballs or something?
A: Right. It’s actually a game. In fact, when you go to the world championship, it’s almost like the NCAA tournament. … It’s really neat.
The other type of awards are categorical awards. So, for an example, there’s the Motorola quality awards, or the “innovations in controls” awards, where basically your control systems or your programming is excellent. There’s all of these different type of categorical awards, and they have several judges who go ’round trying to determine who is the winner for those specific awards. So you have that and you have the actual tournament champion.
Q: And often you guys win them both, right?
A: We’ve been fortunate enough to have won many tournaments. And pretty much every tournament we do we’ve walked away with some kind of categorical award, as well.
This year what makes it special is we had one student who when we went to Duluth, Minn., won the Dean’s List, which is an “outstanding individual student” award. His name is Cody Miyataki. He’s a junior at Waialua. It’s a judged award.
Q: What is the value, really, of attending all these competitions? Are there any monetary prizes involved, or is it just bragging rights? I guess traveling is a value.
A: Well, there’s no monetary award, and besides bragging rights, it’s just all about inspiration. Our students get a chance to see some of the best teams from around the world … so when they get a chance to see other schools and other successful programs, and they’re able to be inspired and get ideas from some of these other programs … I think that’s the really true value of why we do it. You’re only going to get so much being in Hawaii. Being able to see what the rest of the world does, I think that’s the real value.
Q: How does this all fit in with this political flap we had around here recently about teachers going on trips with students?
A: I’m not really familiar with some of the issues with other schools, but I think primarily because we are sponsored by a lot of businesses and foundations and grants from outside of the DOE (the state Department of Education), we’ve been able to help fund these competitions and for us to attend.
Q: How did you get into being the lead teacher and coordinator for this program?
A: Well, back in 1999, we were introduced to this program called FIRST Robotics, and back then, worldwide, this was still a relatively new concept. … We had a team from California that brought their robot to Hawaii, which was sponsored by NASA, and they were trying to get schools from Hawaii to participate, so at the time we had decided that after seeing this robot from California that we would compete the following school year.
Q: Was this serendipity for you, considering your educational background?
A: Yeah, as a result of my background and my passion, it’s the reason I was invited to see this and the reason I got involved. I believe now there’s over 650 organized robotics programs in the state of Hawaii, from K through 12, and we were the very first one. Pretty cool stuff.
Q: I assume other teachers at Waialua are involved, or is it just you?
A: I’m the lead teacher and coordinator, but I also have two other teachers who help us in our program. Because we’re a 7-through-12 school — a middle and high school — those other two teachers focus primarily on our middle school kids, and I focus on both middle and high school.
Q: Is this a full-time class, something you take all year?
A: Unfortunately our school cannot provide a full-time, dedicated robotics instructor. So myself and the two teachers I mentioned earlier, we all do robotics on our own time. We spend many of our afternoons, weekends, vacations and breaks to work with our students outside of the classroom.
Q: But it’s not a class; it’s an extracurricular activity?
A: Both. We offer robotics as a class, primarily where we teach certain concepts — programming, electronics, construction — and then from the competition aspect, all of those things happen after school.
Q: You don’t get paid to do this, right?
A: I do it for love.
Q: As a teacher, what are you there mainly to teach?
A: My official position is I am a career technical education (CTE) coordinator. It is a position funded by the state. Basically what I do is I’m in charge of coordinating some state-level and federal grants that help support our CTE department, which is the old term that they use for vocational education.
Q: Is robotics the modern shop class?
A: Well, what robotics is today, as far as our high school robotics program goes, it’s a hybrid between academics and shop classes. So in the old woodshop you would learn a lot of, I would say, trade-type skills — welding, woodworking, metals, automotive. Now it’s sort of a hybrid where you can take some of those academic-type courses, like engineering, where you apply a lot of the higher-level math and science.
Q: Where does math come into this?
A: Well, we don’t design anything without doing it on computer first. So all of our designs are done by CAD (computer-aided design). All of our students have to learn the software in order to construct robots. The days of doing paper-pencil drafting are in the past. And in order to successfully prepare our students for a post-secondary education, whether they decide to go into some sort of trade or engineering, or any other type of STEM-related field, computers are a big part of it. Providing that software training is very important and critical for them to be successful in robotics.
Q: To what extent do you receive help from businesses or the military in creating your classwork and setting the direction of your robotics programs?
A: I’m glad you asked. I think the reason we’ve been successful over the years is because we haven’t operated in a vacuum. We understand that a school can only provide so much resources and expertise, and I’m only one teacher. So a lot of the success in robotics depends on your volunteer mentors, and I have some great volunteer mentors. Most are either retired or former students, alumni, who are working in the field of engineering. And they come in on their own time, either after school or on weekends, and they work with our students. The reason they help us is because they have a passion for STEM as well, and so they like to give back.
Q: Who donates the materials that you use?
A: We don’t actually get many materials donated. Instead, we have a lot of sponsors. Specifically Dole Plantation, RM Towill Foundation, The McInerny Foundation — these are some of our bigger supporters that have sponsored our program for many years.
When we first started getting sponsorship from a lot of these big supporters, they didn’t really give us that much at the time because robotics was something new. But one of the things we do is we have a big outreach component, where we invite people to come see our facilities. We do tours. We do a lot of community service projects. As a result, because they’ve seen for themselves the value of what robotics brings for the students, they’ve provided over the years more and more support.
Q: What does the program bring for the students?
A: I mentioned earlier that we have a lot of alumni who help support and mentor our kids. Most of them have engineering jobs. We produce a lot of mechanical engineers. We have one that runs one of the main engineering sites at Aloha Air Cargo; so we have graduates in different areas.
I also have a student who was in our program for four years, and her only interest was she loved creating videos and telling a story. This student graduated several years ago, got a full-ride scholarship to a New York film school — roughly $40,000 per year — and her submission as she applied for the college was a robotics video that she did for our program.
I also want to mention that back in 2009 we had a student who was in robotics because she loved to speak with judges and tell the story of our program. In 2013 she became Miss Hawaii USA. She was the only contestant who had talked about education and the value of STEM and had explained that robotics was an integral part of where she is today, of being able to finish college and pursue her dreams. Very different response, and she ended up becoming Miss Hawaii USA.
Q: Are these kids all brainiacs or do they represent a cross-section of the student body?
A: In order to join our program, I don’t look at test scores, at all. The only requirement is that you can demonstrate workplace readiness skills, and you have a passion for some of the things we offer in our program, whether it be documentation, robot-building, control systems, programming … as long as you have an interest in that area, you can join our program.
So, basically, to answer your question, our program consists of a good cross-section of our entire student body. Many of our students play sports, or they’re in band, or Boy Scouts. We also have some students that don’t do any of those things, and are just simply interested in robotics. We also have a pretty good mix of both boys and girls. We’re almost 50 percent females in our program. So we have a pretty good cross-section and gender diversity in our program.
Q: Do you think robots are going to take over the world?
A: You know, I’ll tell you this much: Technology changes fast. It’s amazing. What used to take 30 years for technology to evolve and change and adapt now happens almost every year. So with that being said, you see a lot of things out there where robots play an integral part in a lot of things that can be automated.
