Responsibilities of a Mentor

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Kelly

I think you're missing part of my earlier point. If we wanted to show students what professional engineers can accomplish, it would be a lot cheaper for teachers to just stick a NOVA special on the Apollo program in the VCR and pop out for a coffee. Programs like FIRST deserve to exist because they show students that THEY can become engineers and build cool things. Science has a bit of a stigma in our society and kids think they need to be super-geniuses to excel in it and programs like FIRST can dispel that myth.

If you're already motivated enough to want to build a robot; to believe that students can do a job as good or better than professionals, FIRST has run its course for you. A FIRST team can still teach you valuable technical and leadership skills, but its mission of inspiration is complete. You are not its target.

FIRST is for the kids that don't think that a group of students can do just as well as a group of mentors or that think they are not smart or capable enough to become involved in the process. FIRST is about reaching out to them, holding their hand and showing them what they can accomplish. Once they've taken those first few steps, we hope that inspiration takes hold and they become like you and other students that are driven to learn and do more.

For those kids, mentor involvement is absolutely necessary to overcome the expectations our society has placed on what it means to be intelligent, thoughtful and creative.