Doing the Robot, for Your School

A huge event, with hundreds of participants, takeout pizza boxes stacked shoulder-high on carts, a jazz-rock band, a d.j., teams from about thirty high schools, robots by the dozen, and robot parts by the (probably) thousands spread out on tables in the cafeteria: it was the first day of the qualifiers for the all-city semifinals in the NYC FIRST Robotics Competition, at Francis Lewis High School, in Queens. On weekdays, about forty-four hundred students attend the school. In the rest of the building on this Saturday the hallways were empty. Michael Zigman, the C.E.O. of NYC FIRST, a nonprofit that provides STEM-education resources for students in public schools, stood in the gym, calculating in his head how many people were there. Zigman is a tall, kindly fifty-five-year-old Queens-born man who made money advising tech investors in the early two-thousands and then, in 2016, joined NYC FIRST.