Championship Winners on CNN Live!

[kuro-chan33]

Originally Posted by PaW

This is great! Thanks for sharing this.

The kids explained things very well.

The interviewer's question on "getting dates" was rather inappropriate though. He obviously doesn't get it.

wow.. really??? this makes us sound like we're the stereotypical nerds of the 50's. What is he trying to get across with this?

But it was nice overall that they got the champions on CNN. This will make more people aware of FIRST. congratulations to them!

[MagiChau]

I was annoyed with the interviewer but at least FIRST got on (the most popular?) a popular news network even if it was 22:30 EST (not exactly a time when I watch TV.) Maybe 2010 is is a new decade and a new year for FIRST to be recognized. It helps with the spectator friendly Breakaway having a simple scoring system and robots being easily recognized for the alliance they are on with bumper colors.

[mwtidd]

Personally, I believe that the interview is a pretty revealing demonstration of typical views of FIRST.

Now I am not saying the stereotypes are true, but I think FIRST is missing a huge opportunity by emphasizing engineering.

In the interview, the interviewer is the perfect example of an outsider looking in, and what FIRST has a hard time doing is articulating the potential FIRST has to non-engineers.

This is only my opinion but I believe the business and entrepreneurship lessons taught by FIRST should have an equal impact to the engineering side. Most teams can boast an operating budget of over $10,000 and many teams boast one many times that.

If FIRST competitions had a 50/50 split between Engineering and Entrepreneurship I believe that it would be taken much more seriously by the non-engineering community.

I liken FIRST to the birthday where my dad bought me a Harry Potter book, and I thought to myself "what the hell is this?" later to find out I loved the series.

Imagine if this interview was half about engineering and half about entrepreneurship. Imagine if your team was half engineers, half future business leaders of <insert country>. A huge part of engineering is being able to pitch a concept to non technical investors. I was shocked when I returned home and heard that my school now had a FBLA group, but that it was completely unrelated to the FIRST group. But upon further reflection I realized that FIRST does not really have a strong value proposition for non-engineers.

I think the organization has the potential to be taken much more seriously if there was more emphasis on business. And who knows, maybe if teams at competition were given a marketing or fundraising task, there could be cash prizes for winning teams. Imagine seeing teams at competition being handed a huge check like in many other competitions.

Again, these are only my opinions, but if you look at FIRST's growth its actually linear, growing at about 120 teams a year. This means that FIRST's growth rate is actually declining. In order to maintain its growth rate, FIRST or child program of FIRST needs to change its value proposition to non-engineers.

[Nawaid Ladak]

The Interviewer was Don Lemon. He is honestly one of the coolest anchors working for CNN.

He also tweeted about the robots. funny guy
http://twitter.com/donlemoncnn/status/12373875804
http://twitter.com/donlemoncnn/status/12374981737