Like any good engineer, Dean Kamen sat down and tried to solve this problem. He put all of his passion and his ideas together to create FIRST. FIRST is a program that hopes to encourage students to want to learn about engineering. "I only work on engineering projects that I think bring a new and different insight, which, if it works, will be a big deal," offered Kamen about his own interests. Like many of his inventions, FIRST was destined to make a big impact on society. FIRST doesn’t have education in its title, but it says inspiration and recognition of science and technology, and it is that inspirational process that causes students to come up to Dean and thank him for the opportunity to work on something that is exciting: robotics.
US FIRST is a six week competition where students, teachers and engineers work hand in hand on solving a problem. Each high school team is given the same crate full of motors, batteries, gyroscopes, and other neat stuff, and they all follow the same set of rules. At the end of six weeks, each team ships their robot to a regional event where they compete for three days in qualifying and elimination rounds, resulting in a winning alliance.
This competition opens the eyes of students to more than one aspect of engineering. It gives students the chance to work with different aspects of the field and learn how much their interest is in common with the engineers who often sponsor and work alongside of the students who create the robots for competition.
FIRST attracted the interest of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor Woody Flowers. Dean and Woody were introduced and they im-mediately "hit it off." They were both very enthusiastic about the idea of creating science and technology "stars". Each year Dean, Woody and a selective few others sit down and come up with a new problem that is completely different from any other year’s competition. Woody says, "The keys to a successful competition are that no one team can do it all. This is a team effort. The simplest robot can still compete and be very successful. Coordination of effort and communication between cooperating teams makes the difference between doing well and doing extremely well." Additionally, "It creates self esteem. You have to accomplish something challenging so that you can look inward and say, I did that. That’s a lot of what this is all about," Woody said. Dean agrees, when he wraps up the purpose, "The robot is incidental. Give kids a challenge, with a problem that they can understand, where at the end of a few weeks, they can successfully take an abstract idea and turn it into a reality, that’s what we are all about."
Woody Flowers
