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
SERVO 10.2014 75
THE FULL MINI-SCULPTURE FROM
TEAM SIX.
WIRING
UP A
CUSTOM
CONTROL
BOX FOR A
INTERFACE.