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Originally Posted by Dean Kamen-2008 Kickoff
I would ask you to please focus just for a couple of moments on something that i think is really, really important. Why we do this.
From the beginning, we put FIRST together because of a couple fundamental principles.
We believe that in a free society you get what you celebrate. And we could see, when we started this thing 15, 16 years ago, we celebrate sports. Nothing wrong with it, we celebrate entertainment. There is nothing wrong with that.
But in our culture somehow they became so big they were crowding out particularly for lots of kids and particularly women and minorities, they were crowding out the opportunity to celebrate science, technology, inventing, creating, thinking, solving problems.
It was crowding out for these kids the opportunity to be prepared by developing the skills and getting an education that will allow them to be the next generation of people that will create solutions, cure diseases, solve energy and environmental problems.
And we said we've got to compete for the minds and hearts of kids with a culture that is just sort of gone awry.
But we stole from the books of the world of sports because it's so powerful and we said we're going to create a competition that is every bit as exciting and rewarding and every bit as accessible as bouncing a ball or standing on a stage.
As you can see by our growth, it's worked. But sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for because you get it. And as we all know, the world of sports and entertainment have trappings with them that we don't want to have. Winning at any cost. The kind of behavior we see from a lot of our sports role models. The kind of behavior we see from the world of entertainment and some of our Hollywood role models.
It's not what we want.
So how do we balance the fact that every year our sporting event gets better and more exciting and tougher? How do we balance the fact that we want to compete by making things so exciting that we are the ultimate sport, but that we never end up with the trappings that I think are so unfortunately associated with those other things?
And maybe it's by every year reminding ourselves that unlike other sports, we have a much bigger picture to deal with.
You've heard some of the people talk about some of what that is.
But FIRST sort of wants to be what the NFL or the Olympic committee is to those kinds of activities, we want to be that common ground and coalition for an activity that, frankly, has way, way, way more serious and important consequences than how well we bounce balls.
So in a few minutes you'll start this new season. You're going to see an incredibly exciting competition. You'll be focused on building great machines. You're going to lose a lot of sleep. You're going to be hating me, and Dave, and Vince, and Woodie, for diabolical, frustrating things.
But I would ask everybody, no matter how much you get into the robotics of it all, to remember that again unlike other sports, we're really not about how many points you get.
The end game in basketball is how many points you get. That's what matters. That's whatever -- you have a skill set of whatever is that particular sport bouncing a ball. There is not a lot of other collateral places you can use that ball-bouncing skill. Winning matters.
In FIRST, the skill sets you develop, the ability to understand problems and how to solve them, you begin to understand the power of mathematics and reasoning and logic, analytics, the consequence of participating in FIRST you start to think about career opportunities, you start to think about how you can change the world. That's way more important than whether this robot bounced the ball or didn't bounce the ball.
So I’m literally begging everybody that participates to remember the big picture of FIRST.
The robots, no offense, are just a vehicle. FIRST isn't about robotics, it is not about building that machine or that much. It is about building an understanding of what is possible for people that are prepared, that have the power and tools, science and technology and thinking. FIRST is about building relationships between kids and serious adults.
People have created our standard of living, quality of life. It's about creating hopefully the next generation of kids that will keep raising the bar and making the world a better place for everybody. The robots help make it fun and attract people but unlike other sports, our mission is way, way bigger than the points and so I hope no matter how intense it all gets, you all remember that as Woodie always says, imagine your grandmother is watching everything you do.
Remember, it's about gracious professionalism. Remember that what we're doing here in five or 10 or 15 years may be what inspired somebody to cure cancer or build an engine that doesn't pollute. In that year nobody will remember which robot won or lost but I hope in that year everybody that ever participated in FIRST will remember back to the whole experience and remember back to the relationships we've all created and really believes that everybody is a winner if we do this right.
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