Why do teams voluntarily do FIRST without adult technical mentors?

[Andy A.]

OK. I'll post this quote one last time, and then I'm never bringing it up again. I've done it to many times. It's someone else's turn.

Portions of Speech by Dean Kamen

1998 FIRST Competition Kickoff Workshop, January 10, 1998

The Center for New Hampshire, Manchester, NH

[imperfectly transcribed from a videotape]

copyright 1998 PNHS and GMPT

I don’t know how many ways to try and continue to say it. . . What this organization is about is not education per se. I heard a lot of people, even last night, and I think they mean well, and I understand what you’re saying, there needs to be a balance, but I heard people saying "well sure that other team did great, but thats because the engineers did all the work. The kids didn’t build the robot." I have to tell you, FIRST is not an educational institution. Its okay if the kids build the whole robot, its okay if they don’t touch it. FIRST ought to be to education what the NFL or the World Series is to little league.

Just do the mental experiment in which there is no professional football, there is no little league. Do you think that little kids at the age of six, seven, and eight are going to get up and spend hours exercising, striving to get better and better at what would become a cardiovascular exercise running up and down a field? Imagine how many kids would spend those kinds of hours practicing basketball if there was no Michael Jordan.

The harsh reality is this country doesn’t have an NCAA of smarts or Olympic Committee of brains. We don’t have people as well known as Michael Jordan doing little things like inventing CAT scanners, curing diseases, putting a man on the moon. You and your companies are those people.

Bottom line? It really does you no good to wring your hands over how much your students are learning. What they are learning making a few parts a year is pretty minor compared to what they will learn in collage and on the job. I came out of 3 years on 95 as a student thinking I had soaked up every little detail there was on robotics. The reality was that I had soaked up a bunch of details on how to make a FIRST robot. Theres a difference.

Our job as mentors isn't to teach them how to make a robot. Or to hand them a box of parts and say "Go". It's to teach them that there is value in technology and being among the people who create it. This isn't an easy thing to teach someone who wants nothing more then to get out of school. But you can do it. Just stay focused on whats important.

If I find a student on my team who came through FIRST having learned nothing more then he wanted to go to MIT, I'll give my self a pat on the back and start counting down to kickoff.

-Andy A.