News item: Robotics is booming, but education lags
A Team Duct Tape parent caught this interesting piece in the Journal of New England Technology:
“…higher education has become a “choke point” between high school programs like entrepreneur Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics Challenge and the companies that form the robotics industry, according to David Barrett, a robotics professor at Olin and a member of the MassTLC cluster’s academic subcommittee.
“We have 40,000 kids who want to want to work in robotics, and 40,000 jobs, but only a few hundred spots in between,” he said.
“Though schools — most recently WPI — continue to add robotics programs, the U.S. has fallen behind South Korea in training roboticists and could risk losing the industry like it did shipbuilding, Barrett said.”
