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Video Closed Captions

Student:
Four, three, two, one.

(music, popping sounds)

Whit Anderson:
I've seen some very original designs and some great comebacks from some poor starts.

Whit Anderson:
As a country I feel like we are slipping behind the rest of the world,

Whit Anderson:
so I think things like this are very important.

Student:
This is our robot. It's awesome!

(music)

Student:
It's a competition, really, where schools compete in different events.

And each event, they have to study and build stuff.

(hammering, music)

Yan Zhang:
When I was in high school and in middle school, what we would do was just take our exams.

Yan Zhang:
This is quite different than that.

Yan Zhang:
So they might learn to how use what they have learned in school and use in the real life.

(popping, crowd chatter)

Yan Zhang:
Maybe in the kitchen.

John Grieb:
We are really testing their ability to build a vehicle that meets a particular specification.

John Grieb:
This is the ability to build a vehicle that will operate within certain criteria.

Student:
I feel great.

Student:
I feel elated.

Student:
Yeah, all our hard work really paid off.

(music)

Ekua Bentil:
I think the process of building the robots together teaches them teamwork and also some electrical engineering.

Ekua Bentil:
And also I think it's going to encourage more students to want to go into science.

(music, machine and crowd noises)

Student:
Got quite a bit of road kill there.

Student:
Yeah! Finally!

Student:
That's it. Yeah.

Student:
We learned really, mainly, that ...

Student:
It's harder than it looks.

Student:
Yeah.