Technology advances

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Matthew Van Dixon, Senior Manager of STEM Education for the San Francisco 49ers. When you think about technology and football, you probably think of things like scoreboards and cool instant replays you see on TV. Those are awesome examples of technology, however, what you probably don't think about is how much technology has changed since football was first introduced nearly 100 years ago. The game has evolved dramatically since the early days of listening to the game on the radio, where you read the headlines the next day about historic plays and learn about what team was deemed victorious. And long gone are the days when coaches actually used chalkboards to draw out the big plays for the teams. One very cool way to think about technology and football is how the communication of coaches and players has changed over time. This is probably hard for you to believe, but coaches used to call players on the sidelines on a phone like this, with wires and cords tangled all around them. And they even used primitive hand signals to communicate with players on the field. All of these were useful at the time. Advances in technology has made the game much more efficient and changed how the game's played and coached. Now, coaches can just pick up a wireless headset and transmit a play into a quarterback's helmet radio or communicate instantly with their entire coaching staff with perfect sound quality. Think about some of the other innovative ways that technology has impacted the game of football. At Levi's Stadium, fans can now go online using their smartphone app and have food delivered right to their seat. How amazing is that? We also have scoreboards that are bigger and brighter than ever. And players can now prepare for games by using tablets to study their playbook and review important game video. It's amazing what time and engineering can do when you think about technology's influence on the game. This is an important thing to know, engineering and the engineering design process. It's drives technology improvements over time just like it does with equipment, stadium design, and everything else that goes into the game. Without people like you exploring how things get designed, refined, and introduced to the public to solve problems, we would never get a helmet like this or a phone like this. Clearly, there's a lot to learn about technology in the game of football. If you wanna learn more, make sure you explore this learning module and the exciting activities that go along with it.