January 31, 2012: The US Dept. of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the institution to which we owe the development of the internet, has awarded two California-based companies $2 million to create a program to build robots, drones and other low- and medium-tech gadgets ... in high schools.
The awardees are planning to implement the program in high schools in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, reports Andrew Becker of California Watch.
The team has two years to reach the initial goal of 10 schools, then two more years to expand first to 100 schools then 1,000. The Defense Department wants unlimited rights to everything the students build, including all algorithms, source code, equipment and test use cases.
The two firms awarded the DARPA contracts are a San Francisco-based design team Otherlab, co-founded by Saul Griffith, above left; and MAKE magazine, edited and published by Dale Dougherty, below left.
The new program is part of the DoD's Adaptive Vehicle Make program, a university-based program where teams build "cyber-physical" systems; however, this program, "Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach," hopes to speed up the invention process by involving the youngest minds in science and collaborating by social media.
Paul Eremenko, DARPA program manager, said, in September 2010:
“Challenges will involve the design and building of things like go-carts, mobile robots and small unmanned aircraft. And we’ll encourage collaboration during the challenges through the use of social media and social networking applications.”
From California Watch:
Dougherty recognizes that there are some concerns among hackers about taking Pentagon money and using it for schools, he underscored that the students will not build weapons for the military.
“There’s a small segment (of the hacker community) that is uncomfortable with the fact that we took DARPA funding to do education work,” he said. “It’s naive to think the world of tech is not engaged with the military on every level and vice versa.”
Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.
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