Woodie Flowers, Who Made Science a Competitive Sport, Dies at 75

His death, at Massachusetts General Hospital, was caused by a sudden acute illness following aorta surgery, his wife, Margaret Flowers, said.

The original source of Flowers’ renown was an undergraduate course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the unprepossessing name 2.70 Introduction to Design, which he started teaching in the 1970s.

He would begin the course by handing students what he called “creativity kits” — a grab bag of random parts like paper clips, screws, bolts and wire. He would then have them form teams and instruct them to spend the semester, with him as their guide, designing robotic devices that, if successful, would be able to complete a task of Flowers’ choosing, like placing square pegs in a round hole.

At semester’s end, the teams would compete before an audience to determine whose device solved the problem most effectively. The event became immensely popular, attracting huge crowds and ultimately the attention of PBS, which broadcast it for several years on the series “Discover: The World of Science.”

Flowers later parlayed that exposure into a popular PBS series of his own, “Scientific American Frontiers,” which he hosted from 1990 to 1993.

“The most sophisticated thing designers ever do is decide what to design,” Flowers told MIT Technology Review in a 2011 article titled “A Champion for Supernerds.” “Telling students in an introductory class to design ‘something’ thus challenged them with the most complex task they could face.”

His philosophy on design thinking and his learn-by-doing methods influenced not only generations of MIT students but also academic engineering programs around the world. Most mechanical engineering departments now offer project-oriented, hands-on courses as part of their curriculums.

The Flowers methods “became the standard way design is taught across all engineering schools,” said Megan Smith, a former student who found success as a tech entrepreneur and served under President Barack Obama as the chief technology officer of the United States.

Flowers’ course was so popular that many non-engineering students took it as well.

“It broadens participation so you have more gender balance,” Smith said in a phone interview. “More people are interested if they do something and understand what it’s for while they are doing it.”

Flowers’ influence extended beyond college campuses. In the early 1990s, iconoclastic inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen recruited him to adapt the 2.70 contest concept for teams of high school students in Kamen’s FIRST Robotics Competition. The nonprofit organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was Kamen’s brainchild, aimed at inspiring students to embrace STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and make it as popular an extracurricular activity as football or basketball.

The FIRST competition began in 1992 with 28 teams in a Manchester, New Hampshire, high school gym. It has since morphed into a global phenomenon, with thousands of teams from more than 100 countries competing in giant arenas for tens of millions of dollars in college scholarships. More than 2 million students, from kindergarten through 12th grade, have participated.

“You couldn’t find a more esteemed professor, especially when it comes to robotics and competitions, than Woodie Flowers,” Kamen said in a phone interview. “He stayed with us the whole way, and he was everybody’s professor. He fully understood what we were trying to do, and he was just a fantastic believer.”

With his gray mustache, his ponytail and his warm Southern accent (he was born in Louisiana), Flowers cut a distinctive figure at the annual FIRST championship, serving as its genial master of ceremonies.

As much philosopher and humanist as engineer, he instilled what he termed a “gracious professionalism” into his competitions at MIT and nurtured the same ethos at FIRST. The competitions teach young people “to compete like crazy but treat one another with respect and kindness in the process,” he told The Tech, MIT’s campus newspaper, in a 2011 interview.

“And for the most part, students in 2.70 took pride in teaching others what they’d learned,” he added, “sharing the results of their experiments, sharing ideas. No one thumbed their nose at someone they just beat. It was much more common for a 22-year-old male to give another a hug after his machine just trounced the other.”

Woodie Claude Flowers (he was named after two grandfathers) was born Nov. 18, 1943, in Jena, Louisiana. His mother, Bertie Graham Flowers, was an elementary-school teacher who later taught special education. His father, Aber Lafayette Flowers, known as Abe, was a welder and an inventor.

His father instilled in Woodie a passion for tinkering by letting him help on countless projects, including building a hot-rod car from parts of another vehicle. “I learned as much engineering from my father as I did in engineering school,” he said. His mother taught him a love for nature and reading.

With few financial options, he did not originally see college as part of his plans. “I was going to get a job in an oil field and buy a Corvette,” he told Technology Review.

But an attentive high school teacher suggested that he might be able to go to college on a scholarship for physically disabled students: A childhood fall from a tree had left him with a misshapen elbow and an arm that he was never able to straighten. Following that advice, he applied for and received a scholarship to Louisiana Tech University.

There he met Margaret Weas, a fellow engineering student, whom he married in 1967. She became a lifelong collaborator and colleague in all his academic endeavors. The couple had no children, but, she said in an interview, “the MIT kids and the FIRST kids were his children.”

He went on to MIT for both his master’s and his Ph.D. and joined its faculty in 1972.

Flowers’ insatiable curiosity took him along an eclectic mix of paths — and not just on wheels, as he liked to use now and then to get around at MIT. He became an avid nature photographer, attended trapeze school, took polo lessons and learned to scuba dive, sky-dive and drive racecars, almost all with his wife as a participating partner.

They traveled the world, from Antarctica to the Galápagos Islands, and before his death had just returned from “chasing panthers in the Pantanal in Brazil,” Margaret Flowers said.

She worked as a systems engineer and program manager for a large computer company for 25 years before retiring early to support her husband’s work with FIRST.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Kay Wells.

Years ago, Flowers began what he called the “4 a.m. book club” at the home where he and his wife lived in Weston, Massachusetts. They would wake before dawn, drink coffee and discuss books about politics, philosophy and quantum mechanics.

Asked by Technology Review what hobbies he had, he declined to specify, “because I like everything.” He added, “And that’s fun — not necessarily letting one kind of thing define me.”

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