Troubling, at the very least.
I’m wondering if anyone told Dean about this beforehand? Dumbing down the vision was not his style twenty-something years ago.
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Losing the mention of leaders or leadership is a big deal. We often talk about how maybe unintentionally that FIRST has been one of the most meaningful leadership programs available to our students. This has been recognized by some of our key supporters like district leaders as a valuable addition to our community.
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Dumbing down and shortening the vision doesn’t seem like his style in general, although his speech at MSC did go down by two minutes from 2022 to 2023, so…
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… People run analysis of Dean’s speech length over various years? Is there an Over/Under for 2024?
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At which event?
Kickoff, which is all pre-recorded, they should be able to keep it down a bit.
Champs or DCMPs? HAH!
And yes, people do. I think I was running a timer at last year’s Kickoff while others were doing table hit counts.
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I’m a student right now and I’ll testify to anyone who asks that FIRST is the largest contributor to my leadership ability. My preference would be that leadership remains a focus. Undoubtably it still will be, but unfortunately not formally.
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Don’t be disappointed - the majority of FIRST programs now aren’t. It better reflects the totality of their programs. The old Mission Statement may have been written when FRC was dominant.
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depends, has he had enough beers to tell the truth?
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It’s not reality that FIRST exclusively provides mentor based programs, nor is it accurate in 2023 that a majority of students in FIRST programs are in a mentor-based one.
Exactly. Is the change in mission statement going to change anything I do? No. Is it going to change anything anyone else is doing “where the rubber meets the road”? I really doubt it. It’s what people at that level do to feel like they’re being useful.
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Interesting. I’m curious where you both are coming from on this.
From my side: FLL, FTCFIRST Tech Challenge, and FRCFIRST Robotics Competition have students and adults together. In all cases, adults are encouraged to be giving advice (“mentoring”) to the students. The exact divide of “who has to do what is different”… but I see mentoring occurring in all cases.
Not all teams refer to their adults as “mentors”, but to me that doesn’t imply the program isn’t “mentor-based”.
FIRST Global is the only program I can’t speak to… but I didn’t think this alone could count for the majority?
Do we just have different definitions of what “mentor-based” implies? Or is there something that you’re seeing that I’m not?
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I think in my mind, when I think of “mentoring” in FRC, it specifically means adults who are trained and/or practicing engineers working with the students, exposing them to the nitty-gritty of engineering and passing on their experience.
On the other hand, what I have gathered from volunteering at FTC and FLL events is that many teams don’t have very many, if any, active “mentors” per the above definition, but instead advisors or coaches who help to guide the students and run the administrative side of things, but don’t have any actual training or experience in engineering or engineering-adjacent fields. This is not a knock on them at all, but it also isn’t exactly what I think of when I think of a “mentor-based program”. I also don’t have any sort of data on what proportions of FTC and FLL teams have mentors, but anecdotally there certainly seem to be many school-based teams in the areas where I have volunteered that would fall into the no to low mentor category.
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Disagree (obviously this is all opinions, yours, mine, everyone else’s), big difference between a mentor for a student and an industry professional.
In my mind you described an industry professional. Mentoring, to me, is many times more than just technical experience. I want a positive student experience, that takes more than some engineering or business degree, it takes investment in the students.
FRCFIRST Robotics Competition experience is 90% of the battle anyway
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And fun counterpoint, having FRC experience and mentoring to success in the competition does not necessarily lead to good professional engineering and life skills 
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This is very true. FRC and more broadly FIRST programs do not create engineers or leaders. FRC and FIRST programs are an environment that is supportive of those things. It is up to the individual (hopefully with guidance from mentors or peers) to use that environment. Even then, outside of the FIRST sphere that individual needs to be able to translate what didn’t work and what did work into “real world”.
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Hence the original mission is to ‘Inspire’ students into going to the STEM field. NOT just some robotics program. As Dean always said, Robot was NEVER the point. Robot and the Competition is the carrot that we used to help push the students into challenging themselves and hopefully that process will inspire most of them into wanting to go into STEM field.
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Why have both a “purpose” statement and a “mission” statement? It sounds like your people couldn’t agree and you decided to go with both.
Purpose statement is the reason you exist. Mission is what you do and for whom.
I had to Google it, so shrug
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Definitely agree that good mentoring is a lot more than just technical expertise. The idea I was (poorly) alluding to is that the unique thing about FRC from my experience as a student was that the mentorship was coming from industry professionals.
I received mentorship (in the broad sense of support and guidance) from many different people, including teachers, coaches, coworkers, and of course my robotics mentors when I was in high school. The most impactful for me, though, was from the robotics mentors because they were professionals in the fields I wanted to work in, and I got first-hand experience working with them on (somewhat) similar projects to what they did in their careers. Therefore when I think of FRC as being a mentor-based program, I am specifically thinking of those types of interactions that have a tendency to inspire a deeper interest in engineering and STEM, and that is at least the implication I have inferred from much of the past messaging from FIRST.
However, many FTC and FLL teams for various reasons don’t have those types of individuals as mentors. So I think, barring a substantial push from FIRST to emphasize mentorship from industry professionals across all of their programs, this messaging change makes sense for their organizational goals.
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Wait until you also learn about vision statements.
It’s very common to have several guiding statements and philosophies. From the outside it can look kind of silly, but they do serve slightly different purposes.
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