Inventor Dean Kamen’s Big Ideas

Dean Kamen on his passion for gadgets, his hexagonal home and his robotics competition for high-school students

Dean Kamen Photo: Shawn G. Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Every spring, inventor Dean Kamen hosts his own sort of March Madness: a spectacle in which high-school students compete in events around the world surrounded by cheerleaders, music and entertainment. But rather than playing basketball, they’re focused on building robots, an effort that culminates at the championship in St. Louis at the end of this month.
Mr. Kamen, 65, is known for coming up with the Segway (the two-wheeled electric vehicle), the iBot (a stair-climbing wheelchair) and a portable dialysis machine. He considers the First Robotics Competition, now in its 25th season, one of his best ideas yet. While many young adults look up to athletes and actors as their heroes, Mr. Kamen hopes his competition—designed like a sports event, with regional brackets—will show them that there are other kinds of stars.
“If you think that you can be a superstar in sports or entertainment and make the really big bucks, imagine being a superstar in tech,” he says. “Most of the superstars in technology could buy the whole NBA or the whole NFL and have them play in their backyard whenever they found it amusing.”

More Weekend Confidential

• The Importance of Giving Children Independence March 31, 2016
• Wolfgang Puck’s Next Dish March 25, 2016
• Sheila Nevins Gets Real March 18, 2016
• Jennifer Doudna: The Promise and Peril of Gene Editing March 11, 2016
• John Urschel: From the NFL to MIT March 3, 2016

In the competition, teams of students have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. The robots must then complete various tasks, working in teams. In this year’s challenge, they have to get through their opponents’ fortifications and take over territory in a space set up to look like a medieval battlefield with castles and towers. More than 400,000 students are competing this year, up from about 100 in 1992. “More and more, kids are starting to see that technology is cool. It’s not for nerds,” he says.
Mr. Kamen grew up a self-described nerd in New York’s Long Island, the son of a comic-book illustrator and a teacher. His engineering career started early; in high school, he earned more than $50,000 a year for designing and installing light and sound systems for musicians and museums.