Woodie Flowers: The Father of Competitive Robotics

Woodie Flowers is the co-founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition. His contributions to educational competitive robotics is remarkable. In his MIT Course 2.70, he developed a way to inspire students to work extremely hard, use engineering principles, compete like crazy, and work together with even their opponents. This model is used in nearly all of modern educational robotics competitions today, not just FIRST.

Please watch the videos below to learn more about Woodie Flowers, his course, and his legacy on competitive robotics.

Here is another good video about the course as well.

Here are a couple other great videos about the 2.70 course.

Without Woodie Flowers non of the robotics programs that we have today would ever be possible. Many of the foundational things that we take for granted like gracious professionalism, limited build time, novel challenges each year, etc all were developed under his guidance.

Thank you Professor Flowers for all your work and inspiring so many students,

Spectrum