The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts

The FIRST Robotics competition is held nationally every year and involves high school robotics teams competing at the highest level. To give you an idea of how challenging it is: the game design changes every year, and the game manual is a huge book in itself.

The New Cool is about a robotics team called the D’Penguineers (aka Team 1717) when it competed in the 2009 FIRST competition. The book doesn’t have any pictures, and since much of the story is about the physical design of the robot, I recommend you read the book with a computer tablet so that you can google and youtube pictures and videos as you go along.

As an aid to that, here is the link for the D’Penguineers Wikipedia Entry which links to other sites that contain photos and videos.

Here’s the D’Penguineering site.

And here’s the Youtube video of the 2009 D’Penguineers in action:

By the way, they’re going to make a movie about this. I am looking forward to it, but I can also see a million ways it can go horribly wrong — starting with when a studio executive scrawls upon the first draft of the script the fatal words, “NEEDS TEEN LOVE INTEREST.”