Servo - October 2014

engineering universities. Other than some fancier sensor casings and a new 3D printer, what else has changed in COSMOS and Cluster 2 over the last 10 years? When we posed the question to Professors Delson and de Callafon, we received an inspiring answer.

Ten years ago when Cluster 2 started, the students would come in with a lot of excitement for science and engineering, but without much previous experience with fundamentals like programming. Ten years later, the students selected for the highly competitive cluster (selecting only some twenty-odd students out of over 200 applicants) come into COSMOS with tons of experience. They already know the basics of programming and physics concepts. They come in with a good “design mindset,” as Professor Delson calls it, that gives them a good sense of what is achievable, patience to productively engage in the iterative design process, and the ability to make even their wildest and craziest design ideas come to life.

Professors Delson and de Callafon note that the increase in baseline knowledge and experience in COSMOS students has been noticeable and great for the program because it allows them to jump straight into sophisticated design instead of plodding through the basics first. A good example of this was with the house sculpture — a kinetic art piece designed by the instructors to demonstrate such refined mechanisms like a rocker-crank four-bar linkage (something usually covered in upper division mechanical engineering classes at UCSD).

The root of this impressive increase in the baseline knowledge is an organization well known to SERVO readers: US FIRST — Dean Kamen’s spectacularly successful endeavor that continues to inspire and educate students with competitions like the marquee FIRST Robotics Competition, the FIRST LEGO League, and the FIRST VEX Challenge. When COSMOS began, a student with FIRST experience was the rare exception. Now, each student in Cluster 2 has some level of robotics experience thanks to FIRST and similar competitions.

Every student had exposure to programming and the experience of working on a team on an exciting and wonderfully difficult engineering problem. Thanks to robotics competitions for students, Cluster 2 can cover engineering concepts normally found in upper division university courses with high school students — some of them incoming freshmen.

This sea change in COSMOS over the last 10 years is a great illustration of a concept that explains just how valuable these FIRST programs are. The biblically termed “Matthew Effect” is the phenomenon that is often boiled down to the bumper sticker “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” More dispassionately described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers as “accumulative advantage,” the phenomenon describes the scenario where small advantages in the beginning beget more advantages as time goes on, eventually snowballing to the point where those with a small advantage at the start have vastly outpaced those without it.

Gladwell illustrated this concept with hockey players, noting that children born earlier in the year were physically bigger than their later born peers, with their slight advantage in physical development leading to selection for further coaching, which leads to acceptance into elite leagues, and so on. Psychologist Keith Stanovich observed that the concept also holds true in the educational context with early exposure to reading and small initial advantages in reading comprehension that accumulate to far greater academic success later in life.

COSMOS demonstrates the accumulative advantage of the FIRST program. FIRST gives many students their “first” exposure to programming and many engineering concepts. This background makes them more competitive applicants for COSMOS, and the intense COSMOS experience will help these students gain acceptance to top universities (and indeed it has — Cluster 2 has often been staffed with Cluster Assistants that are alumni of COSMOS), which will then lead to successful careers where these students build the robots of tomorrow. It’s truly exciting to see FIRST (and programs like it) and COSMOS having such a concrete impact on robotics education. SV