A Narrative of how FIRST Changes Lives

[pauluffel]

You have learned well, my young padawan (sorry Chan, Peter"s been watching EpII four times a day for the last week). It"s been amazing what our team has accomplished this year as just a bunch of rookies whose knowledge base began as a crazy sophomore and an engineer who codes and once designed graphics cards (he"ll go on for hours about how fractal compression is so much better than the rubbish that"s being used nowadays [and the scary part is that we listen silently because we find it interesting]). When we finally found a room to build in [during Week 2 of the build], we were soon kicked out under accusations of stealing markers and breaking a duck"s neck <the duck"s neck was broken last year and we didn"t even know there were markers in that biology room>. We finally found a tiny portable to work in and after long labors and intense devotion from these great students, we put together an awesome looking robot that chucked boxes {I don"t think I could have convinced anyone other than a rookie that we could actually build a launching bot - but we made it work} and next year we"ll have even more fun. At competition we had learned enough to teach another team how to calibrate their Victors when our robot wasn"t even moving [that"s gracious professionalism].

The only odd part about this competition is that rather than further convince me that I want to be an engineer, it did the converse. I don"t think I really want to be an engineer when I grow up.

I want to be a teacher.