From BoingBoing: TED alum, Segway creator and inventor of a groundbreaking prosthetic arm, Dean Kamen was interviewed recently by John Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, where he discussed his ideas about education and technology, and why it’s so important for kids to learn how to build and then stage elaborate death matches with 120-pound robots.

“The next president should recognize the power of technology,” Kamen says in the interview. “Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we’ll build an environment that’s sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it.”

With his nonprofit organization FIRST, Kamen has been teaching kids that geeks have more fun since 1989. Watch him give his inspiring 2002 TEDtalk. — Sierra Feldner-Shaw