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GROWING UP in the Commodore Perry Homes housing development in Buffalo, NY,
Ronald E. Dukes used to watch his steelworker dad fix cars and stereos, and dream of becoming an engineer. He never could have imagined that decades later, he’d be helping teams of high school students build high-tech robots to compete in regional and national championships, fully as exciting to those involved as the NCAA basketball tournament.
Early on, Ronald focused on making his dream a reality. He went to technical school, then trade school, then joined Xerox Corp. in Rochester, where he earned his engineering degree at night and worked on moving up from copy repairman to software project manager. All the while, he kept thinking of kids growing up as he had, poor and disadvantaged.
“A lot of my friends from back then aren’t around any more,” he says. “They weren’t fortunate enough to get the opportunities or parental guidance I had. So I always felt I would reach out and try to help if I ever got the chance.”
Ronald began giving career talks on behalf of the Program for Rochester Students Interested in Science and Math, or PRISSM. Later he volunteered for the Xerox Science Consultant program, teaching basic science at elementary schools in poor neighborhoods. Then, in 1992, he found out that Xerox was planning to sponsor a team of students from the city’s Wilson Magnet High School to compete in something highly novel—a national educational robot-building competition, known as For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology, or FIRST. With that, Ronald became a mentor for the X-Cats, as the team is called.
For the past several years he’s served as team leader, helping parents, volunteers, and Xerox employees coach 30 students each year through six arduous and exciting weeks of designing, building, and operating a robot in competition. The kids learn software design, mechanical engineering, writing, project management, scouting, and much more, almost as if the team were a miniature company. And just as Ronald was able to soak up values and goals from spending time with his father, so too the kids from Wilson High learn more than how to make software and gears come alive.
“In the real world, if you can’t communicate and you can’t work with other people, you aren’t going to go very far,” Ronald explains. “So we use the robots as a vehicle to stress what really matters, which is teamwork and communication skills. In fact our motto is, ‘We build people, not robots.’”
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