This weekend, one of my dearest mentors passed away. Dr. Woodie Flowers was one of the most influential people in my education and career and I am so, so sad that my friend is no longer with us. However, I'm also smiling as I recall the amazing stories he told me and lessons he taught me over the years. I want to write something personal, soon, but in the mean time... I am sharing an essay I wrote on his childhood (it is an excerpt from a book I wrote a few years ago.) The pictures of Woodie as a child make me grin. I miss you, friend!
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From Rockets to Robots
It turns out that even the person who taught me how to be safe in a machine shop had a history of youthful risk taking. When I started thinking about people to interview, Woodie Flowers (Figure 4-1) was at the top of my list. This self-described “weird kid” from Louisiana went on to become an Eagle Scout, an acclaimed MIT professor, and the co-founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition. I was fortunate enough to have him as my lab instructor for the much-celebrated 2.007 Introduction to Design and Manufacturing course at MIT. Despite being an ocean engineering major, I signed up for this Mechanical Engineering course because I desperately wanted to be the sort of person who could have an idea and then actually build it. I lost a lot of sleep over that class as a 20-year-old. I saw each machine tool as another way I could chop off an appendage or, at the very least, finally prove that I wasn’t MIT material. Woodie always seemed to have time for me, whether it meant riding his unicycle down the hallway at 7:30 a.m. to go over my design, or to patiently show me, yet again, how to use the milling machine.
Coming from a family that spent considerable time fishing, hunting, camping, and working on cars together, making and fixing things have always been part of Woodie’s life (Figure 4-2). As a teenager, Woodie and his friends were obsessed with rockets. Serious rockets. The fuel that they mixed contained lead and sulfur. They were also able to get lead paint from a friend who could procure it at the oil field, and at that time cans of industrial lead paint came with an extra container of powdered lead to be mixed into the paint. (This was before lead paint was outlawed due to its toxicity.) Woodie had a workshop in the back of the house where the boys built their rockets. Once, during a demonstration, a two-and-a-half-foot-tall rocket
fell over, skittered across the ground, and “almost took out” the group of Boy Scouts who were watching. Sometime after that event, Woodie was called to the principal’s office. This was the only visit he’d made to the principal in high school, and when he got there he was advised he should stop building the rockets because they were dangerous. Woodie admits that this was good advice, and he considers himself lucky that neither he nor others were killed by his rocketry experiments.
Figure 4-1. Woodie and his family camping deep in the swamps of Louisiana on a family hunt- ing trip (photo courtesy of Woodie Flowers)
Woodie’s father was the mentor who taught him how to build things well, and safely. He credits his father for teaching him more about engineering than his undergraduate engineering career. Lots of Woodie’s spare time growing up was spent in his father’s welding shop, where he learned to take care of tools and respect machines. Because their family had very little money, buying Woodie a car in high school wasn’t possible. Instead, an uncle gave him a 1947 sedan that was so worn out that the wheels leaned over to the side. Woodie decided that he wanted to turn it into a hot rod. His father’s response was “OK, Scooter. I’ll help you, but if you start it you have to finish it.” Both men stuck by their commitments and worked together to build a V8-engine-powered “hillbilly hot rod” that became the fastest accelerating car in town. Woodie’s youthful curiosity spanned a wide range of topics. When he wasn’t working on his car or rockets, Woodie was off collecting butterflies, which led to an award-winning science fair project on the impact of environment on Lepidoptera (the order of insects that includes butterflies).
Figure 4-2. A young Woodie with an injured thumb, a condition that he says “was typical of me as a kid” (photo courtesy of Woodie Flowers)
Just as his father had taught him how to build things, Woodie has been teaching these skills to others throughout his entire career. As a Ph.D. student in engineering at MIT, he minored in art at the Museum School and eventually became a teaching assistant in the architecture school because of his ability to turn his ideas into tangible objects. He firmly believes in the importance of hands-on learning, but also recognizes why that is sometimes avoided. “You have to learn things by bumping into things. And that’s scary for a parent, I’m sure. Simulations are good to a point.” Woodie taught MIT’s Introduction to Design and Manufacturing course, in which students spend a semester individually building a machine to compete in an end-of-semester
competition, and turned it into one of the campus’s most anticipated events. However, whereas some competitions seem to bring out the worst in people, Woodie works to instill “gracious professionalism” in all of his students. (He defines that term as “Compete like crazy, but treat each other well.”)
These days, Woodie inspires thousands of kids around the world to design and build robots through the FIRST Robotics Competition. Each year more than 300,000 students in more than 60 countries spend six weeks building machines to participate in a competition that requires not only excellent engineering, but also exceptional gracious professionalism to win. Having been a judge for FIRST, I often get to walk through the competition pits where teams, all clad in safety glasses and helping each other, are excitedly working on their robots. These are teenagers, many of whom are beginners, confidently using potentially dangerous equipment to finish robots that often weigh more than 100 pounds. There isn’t a single runaway rocket to be seen, and participants can enter animations into a special competition for safety videos.
(excerpt from: "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation," Maker Media, Inc., 2014)