From Battlefield Signals to Youth Robotics: How Derrick Kreimann Is Preparing Kids for an AI Future

In this episode of The Hope Table, Erin Brinker sits down with Derrick Kreimann, U.S. Army veteran and founder/CEO of the U.S. Engineering League, to explore how a career in military signal intelligence evolved into a nationwide youth robotics movement. Derek shares powerful stories from Iraq, the life-changing moment that inspired his mission to serve students, and how competitive robotics and AI are opening doors for kids from all backgrounds. Discover why reading is still the ultimate superpower, how ethical AI use is being taught in real classrooms, and how schools and families can plug into free robotics opportunities that prepare kids for the future of work.

Transcript

Erin Brinker: 0:10

You're listening to the Hope Table, and I'm Erin Brinker. While I love talking to entrepreneurs, and especially those who work with kids, you're going to be so excited about my guest today, Derek Kryman. He is the founder and CEO of the U.S. Engineering League, and they do youth robotics. He has the coolest story you've ever heard. Derek, welcome to the

Derrick Kreimann: 0:33

show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Erin Brinker: 0:36

So, so tell us about first of all about yourself. Where where are you from, and and how did you what what part of your background led you into doing robotics?

Derrick Kreimann: 0:48

Yeah, so I my name is Derek. I'm from I grew up in Orange County. Actually, most of my life I lived in Anaheim, California, about a mile from Knott's Berry Farm, so I could actually see like the the tower of Knott's Berry Farm from my house, and yeah, so I had a cool upbringing. It was a really like relaxed neighborhood, and growing up, I played sports. I was very active as a kid, went to the beach a lot, and then once I got into high school, I kind of started getting interested in the in the military. Probably I want to say like my sophomore year, and then when I was a senior in high school, that was when 9/11 happened, and so that kind of started my path. It's kind of weird, but I started my path down into technology because of that incident. That kind of helped shape my decision. Like when I saw that on the news, I had I knew for sure that I was going to join the the military, and then you know I started going through the process probably within a month of that, and then as soon as I graduated, I went to boot camp and got my journey started.

Erin Brinker: 2:13

What which service did you join?

Derrick Kreimann: 2:16

I was in the U.S. Army, and I was in the Signal Corps, so that's how I got my my coding and my technological technology background, and I can go into kind of how that happened if you if you want. Yeah, I I mean I've heard of what I've heard of the Signal Corps, but I don't know what they do. So tell us about that. Yeah, so in the Army Signal Corps, their motto is always always first in, last out. So they're responsible for everything in terms of communication on the battlefield for the military. So you can have a wide variety of jobs, anywhere from like setting up radios, doing the radios in the Humvees or the trucks. You can be a radio guy with the radio on your back, or you can get into like satellite communications, electronic warfare, you know, stealing enemy signals on the battlefield, and that's what I ended up getting involved in, mainly because my wife and I have been dating since high school, and she was already my girlfriend for about a year before I joined the military. And she kind of gave me the best advice anybody's ever given me in my life. When I was going to join the army, I was going to go into infantry, and she told me not to do that. That what happens if you get hurt? What are you going to do for work or your career after you get out, because I knew I was only going to go in the army for four years. The goal was to go in and get money for college, get access to the VA home loan, and then you know kind of start my adult life after that. And so she said, you know, you got to think long term, and so get get into technology, do something with computers, and so when I was talking to the recruiter, they kind of because I scored so high on the Army ASVAB score or ASVAP test, they kind of pushed me towards electronic warfare, which dealt with a lot of like data encryption, coding, searching for signals, learning how learning how frequencies work, like I didn't know that that was a natural resource that the Earth provides to us. So it's actually something tangible, and it's limited in how much we have. And so I learned all about that. Learned about routers, how how satellites send signals up to space, shoot them back down to different places on Earth, and yeah, so that was how I got into coding and and technology.

Erin Brinker: 4:48

So, did you enjoy physics in high school, or did you take physics in high school, or was this all new to you?

Derrick Kreimann: 4:56

It was all it was all relatively new. Like I wasn't, I mean, I had a computer. Growing up, but I didn't really like use it for anything other than like homework. I did take like advanced math, so I took all the way up to like trigonometry, I think, until my senior year. But yeah, I was more of a like I said, I was more of a sports guy. I was more of an athlete. I always had relatively good grades in school, but technology was never on my radar of like this is what I want to do when I grow up. It was something that was introduced to me through the military training that I got.

Erin Brinker: 5:33

You know, it is it is absolutely. Think about all of the roles in the military and all the things that people can do can can all the jobs people can do and being able to communicate on the battlefield. If you can't communicate, you're you're sitting duck, and so that is an incredibly important role. Did you enjoy learning it? Did you like? Did clearly opened a new world for you?

Derrick Kreimann: 5:57

Yeah, yeah. The training was cool. So I went to training in Georgia at Fort Gordon, and it was it was impressive to me how quickly you can get like what we would consider commercial communications up in a battlefield scenario, and so there was a lot of physical activity involved. So my initial role was I was part of a quick reaction force team. So when I deployed to Iraq and we were going into Baghdad, we would go with the infantry or like what would be considered like the front line unit. Even though this war was like a little less traditional, so there wasn't like necessarily like a front line, and you're fighting a distinct enemy. You know they were kind of just like scattered all over. But my role was as we were progressing forward in penetrating into Baghdad, the front lines would need radio communications sent back to whatever the rear detachment was, which was usually at Baghdad International Airport, or the Palace of Saddam Hussein was also another headquarters that we had when we took it over. So my job was, as the front line was progressing, I would throw up these satellites, like line of sight satellites called OE254s, and those would shoot radio signals back, so that way we can radio back for, you know, if we were under attack, we would let people know. We can radio for air support. You know, there was a couple times we got into like firefights and we needed like medical medical evacuations, so that was key. So the the goal for us was within five minutes of basically pulling security or or digging in, as they say, we would have five minutes to set up our communications, our satellites, and get us communications back to the to head towards, yeah, yeah, and so that was the bulk, yeah, and that was the bulk of the physical training when you were when we were in school. On top of, we would also have to learn how to code it. They would give us these like big documents that would give us military, I want to say like IP addresses and frequency maps because there's like you know like the radio uses like high frequency, low frequency. So you would get assigned certain frequencies for your team, and you would have to code those into the routers so they knew where to send the signal, what what wavelength to send it on, and that way your your technical instruments can communicate.

Erin Brinker: 8:40

Wow, so how long were you in Iraq?

Derrick Kreimann: 8:44

One year. One

Erin Brinker: 8:46

year. Yeah. And you know, I, I, you know, you were you were a baby. I mean, you know, 1819, years old. You know how you must have had to grow up. I mean, all in all, guys in the military, you you grow up real fast and learn that the world isn't what you think it is when you're, you know, it's not. Your experience in Southern California is not the same experience that people have around the world. Talk about that that culture shock a little bit.

Derrick Kreimann: 9:12

Yeah. So getting there initially was was scary because you land in Kuwait, and you you got to remember you're young, and so you know you're hearing stories about what the enemy does. You know that there's a lot of terrorists around. You have a perception of what the enemy looks like, and then you get dropped into an area where everybody there looks that way, right? And so there's a lot of fear because you don't know like who to trust, who's on your team, and you don't know like the landscape initially, because there's a lot of different cultures that actually go there to support the military that we weren't told. So initially, like even people that are there to like give you haircuts or cook your food and stuff, you're like, is this a good guy or is this a bad guy? Like you don't know who who to trust initially. So that was. That was unique, but then once you kind of like get the lay of the land, like oh okay, like these are good guys, these are bad guys, type of thing, you kind of settle in, and then you get to really appreciate how different that world, that part of the world is. Everything from I I got to talk to a lot of what we would call like foreign nationals either like from India or people who would be imported from like Afghanistan to to help us or Iraqi nationals, and you get to talk to them a lot about their culture. I was really interested in in their religion at the time. To be honest, I didn't know much about it until I would ask them a lot of like religious questions, and I was surprised to find out that a lot of their religious beliefs are similar to like a Christian philosophy, like they believe in Jesus and things like that. So that was like all kind of new to me. I thought it was like some just obscure religion, but then you get to to know how their their family structures are, but then you realize they care a lot about stuff that everybody else cares about. They worry about where their next meal is coming from. They a lot when I was out there, a lot of stuff was you know shot up or blown out with bombs, and so you would see buildings like that were just like half burnt or big holes, and they had no electricity. So a lot of their electricity was like run off of generators. So it did make me like realize like war was impacting actual people, you know, that were just like us, and that was a lot to take in at a at a young age, but it did seem like like a lot of the people there did support what we were doing, and most of them were happy to see us. You know, there were some people that weren't, but overall, it was it was a very eye-opening experience, in and it felt like I was in a movie almost. Like you would see like movies of the Middle East and like kind of how buildings are, and that's exactly what you would expect it to be like. So you would have some real moments where you're just like, I man, I can't believe I'm out here, and I would say the the one thing that was most impactful that I'll probably never forget was when we arrived to Saddam's palace. We convoyed in from Kuwait. It was a three day convoy from Kuwait into Baghdad, and we actually arrived in Saddam's palace on Christmas Eve, and they had these big what we would call defacs or like dining facilities. So they had food for us, and it was you know because it was Christmas Eve, the army band was playing, and I remember I I had just got into the country at that point. I was there for maybe two weeks total, and I remember sitting down, eating my food, and actually forgetting that I was in Iraq for a brief moment, and then it just like came over me like a wave of like, wow, I can't believe I'm about to be here for an entire year, and so I remember telling my wife that story, and and that that feeling I will never forget that feeling. It was scary, and like I didn't know when I would go back home.

Erin Brinker: 13:32

So the distance became like you you perceived that for the first time really strongly.

Derrick Kreimann: 13:39

Yeah, yeah, and it was it was a weird moment because I had anticipated going to Iraq. I knew I was going to be there, but I kind of fell into this like while I was eating, I felt like I was at home, and then all of a sudden it hit me like, hey, you're not at home, you're at war, you know, type of thing. So,

Erin Brinker: 13:58

were you struck by the opulence in Saddam's palace versus what you saw in the community.

Derrick Kreimann: 14:05

Yeah, so that was a unique experience. So Saddam's palace was was, I mean, for lack of better word, it was amazing. There was gold everywhere. There was jewels everywhere. He actually had a zoo. So when we got there, there was like live animals that we had to extract, like giraffes, zebras, and things like that. That I didn't personally take. Yeah, he had his own personal zoo there. He had a man-made lake that people would come and take vacations at, and we actually turned that into an exercise compound. And later on, but yeah, his palace was abundance. I would say, compared to what the community was living in, which was, I want to say, it's like the Adobe style Middle Eastern homes that you would think or that you would see in a movie. That's what the community lived in.

Erin Brinker: 15:01

So, talk to me about you know when you came home because it's you know culture shock going to a place is expected very often people don't expect reentry culture shock and so talk about what it was like coming home.

Derrick Kreimann: 15:17

Coming home was so there was two experiences I had coming home, so I came home on leave. So in the middle of your tour, you get a two-week vacation. So I flew home. That was hard because it was right in the middle of my deployment. We had just suffered like some pretty big attacks. I ended up getting stationed in Sauder City, which was known as like the market area of Baghdad, where there was a lot of like suicide bombers and stuff, and so our compound was really small. It was a forward operating base, and we would get rockets shot in there on a daily basis. So I got extracted from there, sent home on vacation, and getting ready to go back into that was. I remember the night before I was. I don't know if I was actually crying, but I I know I was talking to my wife and I was laying in bed like I don't want to go back, so that was hard. But we went back. I went back and we finished, and then coming home was was an awesome feeling. So you got to remember, I was 19 at the time, maybe. And when you're in the military, you get like different badges or medals and things for things you do, and so when you are a new person in the military, they call you a boot. You have no like combat patches or anything like that. So your whole goal is like, especially if you're in a wartime environment, your whole goal is I want to deploy so I can get my combat badge so I can feel, you know, like one of the guys type of thing. So coming home, you feel amazing because you have your combat badge on, you have all your your medals and all your awards that you won. I had promoted. I left as a private. I came back as a sergeant. So yeah. So I I promoted in minimal time because of my position and my job and my technical skill. So coming back, you know, I felt really awesome. I felt accomplished. I felt important, and it was a it was a good good homecoming. And then I already had my first child with my wife at the time, so getting to see my family was was awesome, and it was a sense of relief that I made it back like uninjured. So that was good.

Erin Brinker: 17:30

Yeah, I bet. So so talk to me about what you, what kind of work you found yourself in, and you know, and then at what point did you decide that you wanted to get youth involved with robotics.

Derrick Kreimann: 17:44

Yeah, so I had about a year and a half left after I returned from deployment, and I had just missed the cutoff to going back to Iraq. So luckily, I was able to discharge out of the military, and at that time, I had several several job offers. We had some job opportunities from like CIA offices because when you're in a technical field, you get a lot of job offers from either what we would consider like mercenary companies that try to get you on contracts to send you back out as a civilian to Iraq. You get a lot of government agencies that want you for your, you know, encryption and coding skills because you you and you have and I had a top secret security clearance at the time, which was which was hard to get as a civilian if you're not in the military, and so that was valuable, but ended up taking a job with an oil company for a while, doing just coating their their routers and working on that type of equipment. But I always had a passion for sports, right? And so my son was at the age now where he was getting ready to play like flag football and then get into youth football, and so of course I wanted to coach him. So we put him into a football league, and I began coaching youth at that time while still in my traditional job. And my initial goal was I want to become like a high school football coach, or something like that. Just because I loved the feeling of being able to mentor young athletes, young kids, and have them look up to you. You know, when you see them in the store, they're hey coach, you know how are you doing? And then it was also rewarding to me that I would see these kids. Most of them, I worked with them from the time they were like eight years old up until they were in high school, and I would see the development and the maturity and them becoming like you know little young men, and it was very very rewarding to know that like, hey, I had an impact on. Kids, and it was doing a lot of good. So that was that was how I really started getting a passion for working with youth. And then, you know, I also had I combined that with my passion of I had a traditional job, but I wanted to always own my own business. So on the side, my wife and I, we had done different things. Like we had gotten into like Amazon yard saleing, where we'd go find like unique items and then post them online on Amazon and eBay and sell that. That's how I learned like I want to say like the primary concepts of business.

Erin Brinker: 20:38

Right.

Derrick Kreimann: 20:38

And from there, you know, we just decided like, hey, this is a lot of work. We want to take a shot at actually owning our own, like, actual physical business. So we had discussions. I got all my savings, and we were going to buy a subway sandwich. So that was how our journey was going to initially start, but just before we kind of made a decision to invest in that, my son had come home from school. He was now 10 at the time, or 11, and he had told me like, "Hey, Dad, like I know you're really good with computers because after I got out of the military, I started getting into like building computers and and just tinkering in my home office with computers, keeping my skills fresh. And he was like, he told me his teacher had started teaching them how to code a video game at school, but they got stuck because the teacher didn't know how to finish the game, and it was kind of not within his skill set. It was something new that the teacher was trying, and my son had told me like, you should come to our school and and teach kids how to code the video game because I ended up showing them how to finish it and things like that. Cool. And so that was how we, my wife and I like got the idea like, man, that's actually a good idea. Maybe we should teach kids how to code, and so that was how this, the path to where we're at now, initially started. Was my son coming home and telling me like, hey, dad, like you're really good at coding, you should teach teach kids how to build video games.

Erin Brinker: 22:19

Oh, how fun! I know. Did you like? Were you a video gamer yourself? Is that an area where you had passion?

Derrick Kreimann: 22:26

Not too much, actually. So in Iraq, we played a lot of video games, of course. Like that was the only thing to do in your downtime was work out, or like you would have an Xbox and link them together and play Halo or Modern Warfare when we were out there. But once I got home, I really fell out of video games. It was just something that I guess because I did so much of it, and it reminded me a lot of like being in Iraq. I just I got over it, and then my son got really into playing video games, so I kind of lost the passion for that, and it was just the video game connection was just my son coming home from school and and telling me about you know his experience and how he wanted to learn more.

Erin Brinker: 23:10

Very cool. So, at what point did you decide to found the U.S. Engineering League?

Derrick Kreimann: 23:16

Yeah. So we initially started out as a summer camp program in 2014, and we initially were we bought some curriculum off of a company, and they would teach all kinds of different engineering concepts. So coding was part of their curriculum that they would sell. So I didn't have a background in teaching, so like I said, we bought pre-made curriculum, and we offered summer camps. In the morning, we would do some sort of physical, like tangible build. So we would do like aerospace engineering, for example, and we'd have the kids build like bottle rockets out of two-liter bottles and and things like that. And then in the afternoon, we would do more of a like a technology-focused activity, which was either robotics or like coding video games, and so that was how we initially started. We didn't do anything with competitions at the time until about two years into it in 2016. We had Lego robots, and we would do like we would do little robot builds as part of our our summer camp. But my son at home had found out that you can go compete locally with these little robots, and he once again asked me if I can take them to a competition, and they and if he could try it out, and so that was how, in 2016, was how we first started competing in robotics. And I didn't take it seriously, but when we went to this competition, we had just missed the cutoff to make like the playoff round or like the elimination round, and I felt bad because I didn't even think it was like. At a real competition, like a sporting event type of thing. But when I was there as his coach, you know, I'm trying to like give him advice just like I would on the football field, and that's what made me realize, like, man, I was just as nervous for watching this robot run on a table as I was when I used to coach football, and we were in the championship game, and the you know it was the final play, and we had we're trying to win a championship, and so it kind of struck me like, why don't more schools have an academic competition like this, where you have a coach, you have a team, and you're working towards a goal, and you get the same excitement that you would get from a football field or from a baseball field, but it's involving something technical and involving robotics and coding, which is a skill they can also take with them on top of all the amazing things that sports teaches you as a youngster. So, so I

Erin Brinker: 25:58

am the parent of a mathlete. Yeah, not an. I haven't. I have an athlete. My daughter was an athlete. She played soccer for eight years. But my son is a mathlete, and he would have been so excited to have something like this at his school.

Derrick Kreimann: 26:11

Yeah. Yeah. And so it. Like I said, I was a football player, baseball player, wrestler growing up, and even I was like, man, I wish they would have had something like this when I was younger. And so, of course, you know, when you tell yourself that, that should be like a green light. If you do have that entrepreneurial spirit, like maybe I should build something around this. So, because I told myself like I wish they had this not only for me but for my my son in in his school. That was when I had decided. You know what? We're gonna change the company. We're gonna go all in. I'm gonna learn. And and I do have this. What I always say is like, my X factor is like when I get into something, I can really really lock in and focus, and like nothing will distract me from achieving that goal, so once I decided like we're gonna compete again next year and we're gonna win, I learned everything I could. I became an expert at these robotics competitions, and the following season we took Team Two State Championships and we ended up winning. Wow! And so that was that was the true beginning of like me transitioning from a a summer camp person to like an what I would consider like a high level robotics coach, and at this event where we were at, there was a some school officials there, and they invited me to do a summer camp over at Beach Elementary, and so that was where I met Principal Maurer, and she kind of gave me the opportunity to break into the school industry. And she had knew, she had known that I had coached a robotics team, and that we were competing at a high level, and she asked me if I can do a program like that at her school. So that's how the the program slowly started transitioning from like we were a general after school engineering science company to we only do robotics teams. So we still hadn't transitioned fully into running tournaments yet at that time, but I had thought like you know what, I can see like a future in this, like working with kids as a robotics coach, and so that's what me and my wife started doing. So I was approached by school officials with an opportunity to do a summer camp. The summer camp went really well, and then the principal from the school, her name's Miss Mauer. She's over at a beach elementary. She had known that I had been doing these robotics competitions, and she had asked me if I can work with her students at her school within these competitions, and that was what kind of opened the door of me transitioning from like a general engineering after-school program to we only do robotics competitions, and so she also invited a couple other schools. So we started our first like inter-school tournament, and that was my first year coaching students and and hosting tournaments. I believe it was in 2017. I want to say, and so that's how we we started transitioning and into a robotics competition company. You know, at that time, that was kind of the beginning of it, and we had about 30 teams that we were working with, and we ran our first tournament, qualified teams for nationals through World Robot Olympiad, and we actually had two teams that ended up winning national championships that year, and they were competing against over like a. 250 teams from around the country. We took the students to San Francisco, and we made Team USA, and we were able to take two teams, six students in total, from Fontana to Denmark to go compete and represent the country. And I think our best team finished 10th in the world that year.

Erin Brinker: 30:20

Wow, wow! And that would be life changing for the kids. Who you know, when you're a kid, you probably don't go to that many countries. If you do, you might might go to Mexico because it's close. But the idea of you know go all the way to Europe that must have been pretty cool.

Derrick Kreimann: 30:35

Yeah, yeah, it was it was awesome, and and that was another key moment in my life, and when I when I talk about like my experience, I also want to point out that my wife and I went on this journey together. So we're a husband and wife team starting out. So she experienced all this all these events with me, which was also another blessing, amazing experience in my life, but I do remember taking students to Denmark, and I remember when some students from Wayne Rubel actually qualified. The superintendent came and visited their team as we were getting ready to leave, and one of the students. So let me back up a couple seconds, so I remember when the team qualified. One of the students on the team came up to me, and he was like worried, and I was like, "Why aren't you excited? And he told me that he was worried that he wasn't going to be able to afford to go. Like he was excited to qualify, but he was like, "I don't think my family, you know, makes enough money to pay for me to go, so I don't think I can go, and that was like devastating to me at the time because we were small, and I honestly didn't even think of that, and I was like, I don't know, I don't even know if I can afford to go, to be honest, and so that was a reality check. Luckily, the school district over there was very supportive, and they ended up funding the trip for them, so that wasn't an issue. But when we were in Denmark, that same student just stopped me, pulled me aside, and it was just me, him, and my wife. And he thanked me. He was like, "Thank you so much! Like I'll never forget this in my life. And he started crying, and he said, "I actually didn't join the robots team because I didn't think, like, I was smart enough to to do something like this.

Unknown: 32:26

Wow!

Derrick Kreimann: 32:27

And that was like, man, hearing that from him, I was like, "This is now my life's mission. Like, if I only change that student's life, like my life is fulfilled. But the fact that this program had the power to do that, and it wasn't anything that initially I thought was going to be of that great significance, I was like, okay, everything I'm doing for the rest of the time that you know I'm in this profession serving students is all going to be geared towards giving them an experience that they'll never forget for the rest of their lives, and it doesn't always have to be taking them international. You know, that's what kind of led us down to like, hey, let's try to get these international experiences here, so we can get more students having the same experience that this one student had in Denmark. You know, so

Erin Brinker: 33:21

yes, well, and it's connecting him with what's possible, you know. Like I'm not smart enough for that to look what I've done is is life changing.

Derrick Kreimann: 33:30

Yeah, and that same student actually is now a college student at Cal State San Bernardo studying computer science. So him,

Erin Brinker: 33:40

okay. So I'm gonna ask. I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit. Did you cry? I would have cried.

Derrick Kreimann: 33:47

So, so I I didn't cry. So I'm a I'm a big. So that's one of my weaknesses that I'm working on. I'm trying to be more expressive of my emotions, but I think my military background kind of shut. Oh yeah,

Erin Brinker: 33:59

I've cried. She probably cried.

Derrick Kreimann: 34:02

My wife did, yeah, for sure. She was like,"Wow, like you know, we're doing something special here.

Erin Brinker: 34:06

Indeed.

Derrick Kreimann: 34:07

And so, so, but I definitely, I was definitely emotional. Like, I was like, "Wow! Like, I can't believe, like, you know, I don't think too highly of myself, but I was like, I can't believe, like, I'm working with kids, having an impact. I don't know how I got here, right? You know, but this is what I'm doing, and you know, it's I love it.

Erin Brinker: 34:33

So talk to me about the process. So you you start out in a school district, in an individual school. How do students engage and become part of the U.S. Engineering League?

Derrick Kreimann: 34:46

Yeah, so we're actually a nationwide program. So anybody across the United States can put together a team, just like I did with my son, and buy a robot. Now we are open platform, so you can buy any. Robot kit, or even custom make your robot kit like DIY style. Join the go to our website uscoouthrobotics.com and sign up and join any of the tournaments that that are available. So you don't have to necessarily beat through a school system. However, what our company what our company specializes in is we help school districts provide competitive robotics programs at scale, right? And so that's kind of you know my entrepreneurial spirit scene as I started working with schools initially, realizing one that if I kept all this knowledge to myself and just became like an expert coach. There was only so many students I can serve, right? Because I'm limited in my time. So during COVID, I wrote down everything that I could. We started generating our own curriculum, so that way we can train other people to be coaches. And when a student wants to participate, we usually are set up at a school site, and we're there for an entire school year. So, we have like what's considered a first semester foundations program that's tied to a beginner tournament at the beginning of the year, and that's good for anyone if they've never done robotics or even if they're advanced, like the tournament's set up to challenge you based on your skill set, and then but it gives us an opportunity to work with every student from like a level playing field from ground zero, as if they've never done any robotics or coding, and teach them all the skills that are going to be necessary to compete at a high level in World Robot Olympiad, which would be like the second semester of the program. So, for us, partnering with schools is awesome because it allows students to take our program, and it's something that is funded through like ELOP programs, and it's made available to them at no cost. And in the past, when I first started out, some of the most competitive teams around the world and even in the United States, these families are paying 10, $20,000 a season to get a high-level coach to try to get their teams qualified for nationals. So we try to bring that experience and that skill set to students at all our local schools, so that way they have access to the same training, they have access to the same experiences that you know they may might not otherwise be able to afford on their own.

Erin Brinker: 37:34

Wow, that's an incredible opportunity. Now, when when people think of and and maybe it's been a little bit long, too long now for some of the young kids. But when I think of robotics competitions, I think of that episode from the Big Bang Theory where their their their robots are like fighting to the death.

Derrick Kreimann: 37:52

Yeah, yeah. I remember briefly. I don't. I I'm a big fan of The Big Bang Theory, and I remember that episode, but I don't remember the specifics. Had

Erin Brinker: 38:00

flamethrowers and buzz saws and all kinds of stuff that you would not see with kids. So, but but when I I visited your orientation for your summer program just recently, and you there were competitive like you but you had to push the push robots had to push the other robots out of the circle and whoever pushed the robot out won, and I saw a couple of kids, you know, digging it out, and it looked like fun. Talk to me about the the categories of competition because there were lots of different things going on in that room.

Derrick Kreimann: 38:34

Yeah, so over the years, we we are now U.S. Engineering League is now the national organizer for World Robot Olympiad, so that's the main competition that that we run the national championships for, and that we're responsible for organizing to select Team USA.

Erin Brinker: 38:54

Wow!

Derrick Kreimann: 38:55

But there's four categories within World Robot Olympiad, and then the category that you're referencing, which is sumo bots, that's a category that we created outside of the structure of World Robot Olympiad that they recently adopted. We created that category during COVID because in World Robot Olympiad it's very coding intensive and it's advanced coding intensive, and it's not focused as much on the mechanical engineering aspects as it is with you know, which is why we developed SumoBot because there's some students that you know they get into coding, and coding can be very very tedious. So I'll be honest. That's one of the things that I learned, like from being in the military, was like, man, coding it takes a high amount of brain power in terms of focus. So it's not that you have to be smart or like a genius to do it. It's just, it's just tedious, you know. So some students

Erin Brinker: 39:57

attention to detail.

Derrick Kreimann: 40:00

Exactly, and some and some students they're just like not into that, right? Like they're just like I know how to code, but it's not my cup of tea type of thing. But they still want to be involved in robotics, and some students are more hands-on, and so they love building. And so I felt like there was a category that was lacking that would force students to actively recreate their builds because in all the other categories in World Robot Olympiad, like you kind of settle on a build, you build it at the beginning of the season, and then you're really just focused on adjusting code throughout the year to try to make your robot faster, more efficient, and things like that. You'll make minor adjustments to the robot build, but you're not like recreating or restructuring with sumo bots, the the competition is won and lost based on your robot design. So, in between rounds, you'll even see students like disassembling the robot because maybe they thought they had a good build, but an opponent's robot ended up getting underneath them, getting leverage, and pushing them off. So they're trying to build like defense systems to try to prevent them from losing in future rounds on the same day. So it's fast-paced and it's less tedious and more, you know, hands-on focus. So those type of students who are really into that, that really really draws them in, and it also helps us capture those beginning students that are maybe like you know we get a lot of students that think coding is too hard, and so they don't even try it, right? So this this category sumo bots is meant to get those kids into a fun environment. It's also a remote control competition, so they have a PlayStation controller that they code, and they get to drive their robots manually. It allows us to capture those students that may feel like you know robotics and coding might not be for them. But hey, you know what? Like this is something where I can do a Lego style build, and that looks fun. And so that's how we capture capture those students in that category. And so that was the sumo bots category that you saw at our facility. But in World Robot Olympiad, there's four main categories that students can compete in. So Robo Mission is the most popular. That's the one that if you attend ours, we have the most teams in. This is the category that we run in our after-school programs with partner schools, and it's basically a tabletop, four foot by, or I want to say eight foot by two feet long, tabletop, and it has every year there's a new mat that is laid on the table, and there's little like Lego pieces that are built into missions, and depending on the host country every year, so there's 100 there's over 100 member countries that participate in World Robot Olympiad. The theme is designed by the host country. So, for example, this year Puerto Rico has the theme of robots meet culture. So it's all about how robots have impacted culture throughout the world, and students have to build and code a robot to solve as many randomized missions for the season in under two and a half minutes.

Unknown: 43:10

Wow!

Derrick Kreimann: 43:10

So, yeah. And so the the philosophy behind it is it has to be 100% autonomous. Even though the competition is randomized, there's there's kind of like structured rules, but the robot has to be able to solve any combination that they're presented with at the beginning of their round. And so, in competition, students get three rounds, and it's their highest score out of the three attempts is what counts towards their overall standing. So that's the robo mission category, and it's open for anyone ages eight all the way up to 20 or no 18 now. Then we have Future Innovators, which that one's also open from eight to 18, basically elementary to high school, and it's basically a science fair. But the only rule with ours is there has to be a robotic component tied to the theme, and it has to be a project tied to the season's theme. So it's open category; they can use any robot kit they want. But if you're familiar with science fairs, that's how that category is run. There's also robo sports, which is kind of a cool category. The competition changes every four years. These last four years, it's been doubles tennis. So the students have to build two robots that can play. It's more of a ping pong match against each other on a ping pong table, but they have to shoot ping pong balls, and whichever team has the most ping pong balls on their side ends up losing the match. So your goal is to try to shoot all the ping pong balls over there, and the robots are autonomous. They're not remote controlled. Every competition in World Robot Olympiad is fully autonomous, so there's no remote controlled robots.

Erin Brinker: 44:53

So they're really having to think about a chaotic environment because that ball could, you know, go anywhere theoretically. And they're having to prepare for that and make sure that their robot can react to that. That's incredible.

Derrick Kreimann: 45:06

Yeah, and there's different like little caveats to it. Like some of the robots are different color, or some of the balls are different colored. So some of them are like there's a purple ball this season. So you want to have the purple ball on your side. So you also have to use like color sensors, ultrasonic sensors, so that way your robot can see what color the ball is, and it knows whether to shoot the ball over or keep it. And then on top of it, in robo sports, there's two robots on the court, so you got to worry about them seeing each other, crashing into one another, you know. And so students have to code all those scenarios, and that's where artificial intelligence comes in into our competitions.

Erin Brinker: 45:45

Well, and that was going to be my next question: How much? Because AI, you can have AI do all of the coding, but you don't want that. You don't want them to do that because they're not learning. So, what are the parameters around the ethical use of AI in this competition?

Derrick Kreimann: 45:59

Yeah. So, so that's something that the world organization is trying to standardize. But ultimately, our competitions have the ethical standard that you know even this this involves coaches as well. As long as your students understand one how they built the robot, how it mechanically functions, but if they can go into their code, change different parameters, you know, on their own without an adult intervening, and if they know how to explain to a judge, like because sometimes, you know, in international competitions especially, there's competitive teams that will say like, hey, this this team is getting too much help from their coach, and that coach is coding for them, right? So that was like a big thing in the past. So like judges will go up to the students, have them open their code, and say, hey, explain to me how all this works, right? So for us, me personally, I am very supportive of AI assisting students in coding. I use it personally in my business, so so I'm always a big believer in like why would I have a tool at my disposal that I wouldn't allow or teach my students to use because it's only something that is going to enhance their ability. However, they're not going to be able to use the AI effectively to code if they don't understand the fundamentals of how coding works, how it interacts with with machine machine components or robot components and things like that. So it's on us as adults to teach students the fundamentals, so that way they can, you know, enhance the abilities and enhance the knowledge that they have with the assistance of AI. So we allow students in our competition to use AI to help them code some of their robots, but the AI is not going to be able to code everything for them. And a big skill that students actually get from using AI to code is they have to specifically articulate every movement and every measurement that they want their robot to to react to, or every movement they want to make. So the explanation to the AI is a difficult skill that we actually have to teach our students, and this is something we've realized within the last two years. Is like, hey, students actually have a difficult time trying to articulate ideas to an AI to get it to work or develop code that is effective. Because you got to remember, AI doesn't have eyes, so the student has to be the eyes for any sort of AI software that they're using, and with us, they have unique robot builds. So they have to tell the AI like, "Hey, I'm using motors. They're plugged into these ports. These are the size of my wheels. This is where my arm is located. This is how many degrees it can it can you know lift or or release how how wide it can open, so it's a really great tool to get students to really understand how their robots are mechanically built and how they actually theoretically work, right? And it allows them to test. To me, what it what AI is doing now is allowing students to code a lot faster. So what and it allows us to teach faster with students. So some of the lessons that used to take us, you know, two weeks of after-school programs, we can now teach students in 10 minutes using using AI because we don't have to sit there and wait for them to type out each letter, write out each comma. You know, the AI takes over a lot of that work that used to be tedious, and it allows students to really just implement ideas straight from their head. Like, if they have a robot, as long as they can describe how the robot's built, where all the where all the components are connected, and you know articulate how much power is in their motors and how big their wheels are, they can basically tell AI now. Like, hey, this is the robot that I have. This is how it's built, and I want it to drive in a square that's 10 inches on each side, and the the AI can now produce code, whereas in the past we used to have to actually teach students how to spell out a lot of the words and and have them take a ruler and and and do measurements and type out each number, and it it was really time consuming. So to get them to drive in a square, which was one of our primary lessons to teach them fundamentals, it would take us two classes. So almost 90 minutes each class. So two full classes to get them to complete that assignment, and now we do it in about not 10 minutes, but about half a class.

Erin Brinker: 50:43

So, and and it this is incredible that you that you are doing this. One of the one of the things that one of the challenges of people being kids, especially having too much screen time, is that they're not reading. They're not, and if you're not reading, you're not developing vocabulary. You're not learning how to think things through, you know, their attention spans are much shorter, and there's this overall this more generalized conversation happening in educational circles about how you remedy that problem. There's been stories recently about you know kids getting to these high end universities like UC Berkeley and UCLA, and their math skills are terrible and their reading skills are terrible. What you're doing is they have a problem that they want to solve. You have you're telling you're teaching them how to get above that problem and think about that problem and how they might solve that problem, and then using AI to help solve it. That is tremendously helpful in in critical thinking skills in developing the language that they need to be able to articulate their problem and then fix that problem-that is a tremendously important lesson.

Derrick Kreimann: 51:48

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And a couple things that I want to touch on before I leave here, because I really believe it's super important, especially with the rise of AI. You know, one, our students, whether we teach them to use it or not, they're going to enter a workforce where everybody competing against them for jobs is going to be using it, and it's the ones that know how to leverage it that are going to have the biggest advantage and going to be able to create the most opportunities for themselves. Right. So for me, it's a it's a really big thing where I have to. I truly believe I have to show students like, hey, this is what you can do when you know how to, you know, use this technology in the right way, and that leads me to a lot. A lot of students when I go to career days, they they'll ask me like, hey, what's the most important subject that I should study in school for the future. That's a question I get a lot from like junior high students or even some older elementary students, and it always surprises them that I tell them the best thing you can do for yourself is read. Like reading is the most important skill, at least in my opinion, that has helped me be successful at business and being able to be good at every job that I've had has been because when I was little I would read a lot and I was always a good reader. It is a skill that some people you know you have to develop. Luckily, I was it was natural to me. My grandpa was always reading books and it was just something that I would see. And when I would get books assignments at school, I would model it. I would sit down and I would slam through a book in two or three days. So I got really good at reading, which helped my comprehension, which helped me to write, which also helped me to be able to articulate ideas, and it also helped me learn faster. And with AI, if you can't read, you can't interact with many of the platforms. So it's just that that is a critical, critical, critical skill that I always tell students. Like, you know, if you don't take away anything that that I bring to the table, is please, please read as much as you can and get really good at reading because I'm a firm believer. If you can read well, it's going to increase your chances, and you're going to have a high probability of being successful and achieving more things than than your peers who are not avid readers. Avid readers,

Erin Brinker: 54:17

indeed, yeah, indeed. So you have some competitions coming up this summer, and then into the fall. Can you talk about those real quick?

Derrick Kreimann: 54:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have two big competitions coming up. So one on July 25th, and that's going to be at the Ontario Convention Center, right here locally in Ontario, California. A lot of people get that confused with Canada, but we're we're in California. We have Ontario here, and yeah, that's going to feature over 150 teams. This is the public school championship, so all all teams participating in this event, whether if they're from California or from outside, we have some teams from like Florida. And Washington coming out, they have to qualify through a school-sanctioned qualifier, so their school has to run it, and it kind of levels the playing field, so that they're not getting any, you know, outside like what I call like hired mercenary coaches that are coming in and giving them an extra 50 hours of training, you know, so they all have to run through the same structure, through the after-school like ELOP programs, and then they come out and they compete, and the top two in each age group will advance to international finals in Puerto Rico. So that's a big event coming up, and then our other one is in September. It runs from the 25th through the 27th, and that is the America's Open Championship, where we'll be hosting it at the Ontario Convention Center once again, and we'll have over 30 countries, mainly from Latin America, but we have some countries from Asia and Africa coming out, bringing teams. We'll have over 200 teams, and it's a way for us to provide an international competition atmosphere for all our students here in the local area. And so, any of these competitions, you don't have to be part of the competition to come out and experience it, or bring your kids to come see the competition. We have some activity booths at all our competitions for spectators or our siblings. But it's a great way to one at the international competition to meet kids from all over the world, and that's a unique aspect that our competitions bring to students in the area is the getting able being able to meet kids their age with similar interests from all over the world and realizing like hey you know we're not we're not that different we all like the same stuff you know

Erin Brinker: 56:53

you know I have to tell you one of the things that I'm enjoying with the World Cup I'm I'm on X a lot and and all these people from all over the world for the World Cup, or they're they're posting their videos of discovering the United States, and there's you know they're as they're going to different sporting events, not only soccer, and they're experiencing things all over the country and all over the world, and it is beautiful to watch these people over sport, celebrating and getting to know each other and having a good time, and there's real value in connecting with people outside of the United States.

Derrick Kreimann: 57:28

Yeah, I 100% agree, and it just brings me back to just a brief story of when I took the team to Denmark. That was my first time traveling international as well, and I didn't realize like kind of how much of a bubble that I was living in until I went to Europe and I got to see how like Europeans see the world, how Europeans view us as Americans, how much our I didn't realize how much our our government, our politics actually affects people in Europe, people from all over the world. So it was eye opening to me, and it was it was a great experience. It wasn't anything negative. It was just like, wow. There's a whole world out here that is one makes me proud to be in the United States, but also lets me know that hey, there's different ways of thinking, different walks of life, and and it makes you appreciate the things you have, and that makes you want to learn learn more, you know. So, it was a great experience that I had as an adult. So

Erin Brinker: 58:26

yeah, I I bet you know, and it's and it's you can love being from the U.S. and they can love being from you know El Salvador or Denmark or you know Mongolia or wherever, and you can all still find ways to connect and you can all still respect each other as people, and and that's a beautiful thing.

Derrick Kreimann: 58:46

Yep, and you also realize like how much everybody, even though we have different ways of getting to it, like this is my thing. Like we all have our our different opinions on how things should be in every country around the world, but ultimately, everybody I met, we're all worried about the same thing. We're worried about making a difference in the world, making a positive impact, and we're worried about our families, and and we're also worried about our kids' future, you know. And that's where you know I bring it back to to AI and robotics. Is everybody I meet? I I meet a lot of. I'm in a couple business groups with people who are billionaires, believe it or not. Like one of the people in our groups is the owner of the Orlando Magic. Meet people who own law firms, like like 30 or 40 different law firms across the country. So I meet people that make a ton of money, like way more than I can even ever imagine, and when I'm at these events and these conferences, the one thing we all have in common is we're all parents, and all of these people, whether they're billionaires, millionaires, new to business, you know, whether they're lawyers, doctors, whatever industry they're in, they're all worried. About the impact that AI is going to have on their kids' future, and they want to know how they can set their kids up for success into the into a future we don't even know where it's going to be in five years. So it's scary and exciting at the same time, but that rings true for people in the U.S. and it rings true for people all around the world, is everybody is concerned about their kids and how they're going to, you know, create a good life for them with the impact that AI is having on the workforce.

Erin Brinker: 1:00:32

So, how do people? Because we're out of time, and this has been incredible. How do people find out more about the U.S. Engineering League and maybe get their kids signed up.

Derrick Kreimann: 1:00:42

Yeah, so if you go to our website useloutrobotics.com, there's information about competitions on there. Some of our summer camp programs. One thing I want

to mention: 1:00:53

if there's any parents or educators out in the Inland Empire, our summer camps at our facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California, are 100% free, so I'm really I'm a big believer that education should be free for our students, and so through our district partners and things like that, like that's a blessing that we have that we're able to provide these opportunities at no cost. So anybody that wants to bring their kids out to come learn about robotics and AI. Go to our website, or you can send us an email at info at usengineeringleague.org, and some of our staff can help you get signed up. And for any schools that you know want to bring more AI and robotics instruction to their students, they can take the same path. They can email us. You can email me directly at CEO at usengineeringleague.org. And if you're a new school bringing these competition programs to your students, my philosophy is run a pilot for at your school. It's no cost, so it's a it's a low-risk, high-reward way to try our program out, see if it's a good fit, and if you like us, you know we can discuss being there long-term. And I haven't had a school that hasn't liked us yet that we piloted at. So, but I will say, if you don't like us, then you know nothing lost, right? So, so email us or visit our website and get in contact, so we can come impact more of your students and more of your children.

Erin Brinker: 1:02:27

Well, Derek Kryman, thank you so much for spending this time with us today, and what an incredible organization you're running. And looking forward to seeing you all compete in July and again in Puerto Rico if I can make it in December. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Derrick Kreimann: 1:02:43

Awesome, sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Erin Brinker: 1:02:47

Well, that is all we have time for today. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'm Erin Brinker. You've been listening to the Hope Table. Have a great week, everyone.