Seale ’13 and Dai ’13 featured in book on robotics competition

Luke Seale ’13 and Angela Dai ’13 were featured in “The New Cool,” a book released earlier this month by New York Times best-selling author Neal Bascomb. The book details the story of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy’s FIRST robotics team on their way to the division finals of the national competition in 2009.

Bascomb previously topped the New York Times Best Sellers list with 2004 book “The Perfect Mile,” which detailed Roger Bannister’s breaking of the four-minute mile barrier.

The FIRST Robotics Competition features 1,800 teams and 45,000 high school students from across the globe who participate each year. Each team, which can range from 10 to 100 members, must build a robot to play a uniquely formulated game announced each January. In 2009, the goal of the game was to place as many balls into baskets that trailed the opponent’s robots. Competitions are designed to foster community and cooperation by randomly assigning 3-team alliances who must work together to compete for the duration of the competition.

Bascomb, who tried to find teams to follow throughout the entire preparation and competition process, was led to the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy team by a regional director of the competition in California.

Calling themselves the D’Penguineers, the Dos Pueblos FIRST robotics team was unique for two reasons: all 32 members were high school seniors, and the members of the team made up the entire graduating class of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy. Neither was a coincidence. Each year, 32 students set to attend Dos Pueblos High School are selected to study at the school’s Engineering Academy. Amir Abo-Shaeer, director of the academy and coach of the school’s robotics team, built a science-intensive curriculum designed to prepare each graduating class for their eventual participation in the FIRST robotics competition during their senior year.

“No other FIRST team is organized this way,” Seale explained. “This system also allows us to expose three times as many students to FIRST than other, club-like teams.

Described in the book as “beanpole thin, with a penchant for wearing a beret,” Seale was a part of the D’Penguineer’s drivetrain team, whose task was to design a system that allows the robot to move in any direction, mainly through 3-D computer modeling.

“I learned modeling before the season, when another mentor volunteered to teach me and six other people how to use the software,” Seale said. “Thinking in 3-D about the parts, then having the computer model become reality, is immensely satisfying.”

Dai, a member of D’Penguineer’s electrical team, was described in the book as “a quiet, retreating math savant.”

“I don’t feel like I am a math savant,” Dai said. “There were some instances of overdramatic flair, but I think the book was pretty faithful to the ideals of FIRST and what our team was trying to achieve.”

Their skills paid off, as the team members ranked as Championship Division Finalists, equivalent to quarterfinalists in the national competition. They also won the Motorola Quality Award for having the best-made robot.

Dai and Seale both said the book’s publication made them feel slightly more pressured during the competition but that they were ultimately not too distracted.

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“There was definitely more pressure to do well, but that pressure has always been there with the growing popularity of our engineering academy,” Dai explained.

“It only added to how much we wanted to do well,” Seale said. “I feel like we had a normal experience. Only now it’s immortalized forever and [will be] read by thousands of people.”