I’ll admit it, I never thought too highly of people who study engineering. I always thought they were boring people who are handy if you need a building put up but might fall short when it comes to having a real conversation about, well, anything. It seems like a boring profession, and it doesn’t help that many students in engineering use universities like they were trade schools.

But my perspective changed on June 23 when I saw 24 high school students jumping around, screaming and having the times of their lives. These students took Introduction to Inventive Problem Solving in Engineering (EGN 3935) at FAU. They built robots out of Legos and raced them through a maze.

The point of the competitions are to show that “learning can be fun,” according to Professor Daniel Raviv who has been teaching at FAU for 15 years. Raviv does a wonderful job of fusing the fun aspect with learning. At the end of every competition he rewards his students by giving them little puzzles to play with. There is even a room with over 250 puzzles that students spend a few hours with each day. “I built the puzzles myself,” said Raviv as he took me to the room which is only available for students in Inventive Problem Solving.

It was amazing, hundreds of puzzles sprawled out all across several tables. It was a mathematician’s utopia. They weren’t boring puzzles, nor easy ones. The class is about being “more inventive, more innovative,” according to Raviv who is more like a hip Bill Nye the Science guy than a jittery Dr. Fink from the Simpsons.

Raviv and his course are good things for FAU. His laid-back demeanor and his creative attitude towards learning seems to get through to these kids. And while they might be honor students in high school, they’re still high school students. Getting through to them usually has to do with a TV or some adult taboo that they’re banned from, but with Raviv, they seem to just be focused on building cool-looking robots.

The key to Inventive Problem Solving is that it’s incentive based. Schools can offer ice cream and pizza parties if they do well on the FCAT, but this class offers a far greater and healthier reward – to build something and put it to the test. Students get to design their own robots and then see if it makes it out of the maze in one piece or just spins in place. Either way it’s fun and fosters a love for learning.

In fact, this class isn’t the only place people can learn to build Lego robots. There’s a whole international community building these things, racing them and learning how to apply seemingly boring disciplines like logic and mathematics in ways that keep students awake.

I might not be the most science-savvy guy on the planet, but even I watch these kids race their robots and get an inkling of how to build my own contraption. I never remembered being as excited about a class as these kids get when their robots get put to the test. Perhaps the best thing about the class is that it’s a lot like life – the competitions change every year to be more innovative. That’s what all students should learn: that life offers new challenges every day. It’s time to get used to solving them.