Who am I and what am I doing here?

First of all, my name is Roger Smith and I am employed as a Software Engineer and have been in this field for over 19 years. I have some educational experience in Electrical Engineering, however my degree is in Engineering Graphics and Computer Science.

I began my career writing CAD software in Assembly Language and have migrated through Unix workstations to Windows. I am currently developing software for Windows platforms to allow interior designers lay out office furniture.

I think it was roughly six or seven years ago I attended a manufacturing conference in Chicago. Dean Kamen was a speaker, and I was very excited to hear what he had to say. This was shortly after he announced the Segway Human Transporter. I had heard of FIRST at this time, but really didn't understand it, or for that matter even feel it was very important. I wanted to see Dean because I wanted to see and hear about the Segway.

Dean came out on stage to speak, and of course he was on a Segway. He talked a little about what was involved in designing it and probably could have gone on hours about it, but he said that he'd rather talk about FIRST. It was the next 20 minutes that has changed my life. The way he talked about the state of our educational system and what FIRST has done to change it was simply amazing. I knew that when my kids entered high-school I was going to push them to join their school's team, and possibly I'd help out.

When my daugher (my oldest) started 9th grade I told her to keep an eye open for announcements about the first meetings of our school's team. She never saw anything. It turned out that our school was working with another school and they were not getting much support from either school. Well, we missed that year (2006) and I was determined to get involved the following year. I did meet up with some folks on our team and followed along as registration began for 2007. At the last possible moment our sponsor decided to throw in the towel and our team had no alternative other than to look for an established team to work with.

In January 2007 I officially became involved with FIRST by helping mentor one of the areas of the team that so graciously allowed us to work with them. In the coming months I gained such an appreciation for what FIRST is doing that I began trying to get the old team from our school back together. All our efforts fell on deaf ears and nothing happened.

Our combined team did quite well in 2007. We were on a winning alliance in Chicago and enjoyed a fantastic trip to Atlanta for the World Championships. It also became quickly apparent that our kids would be working again with our new friends for 2008.

I am excited about the 2008 season; I will be mentoring again, this time with the kids doing programming and electrical. I keep trying to get a team going again back at our school and I am still getting nowhere.

In all actuality for a school to have a FIRST team is rather rare. I didn't know this in the beginning and have taken on the role as a FIRST activist. Not only do I want to get a team started in our school, I think every school needs a FIRST team.

So, now that you know who I am, the reason for my blog is to let the blogosphere know about FIRST and how working on a team benefits students. I intend to post details of our 2008 season, my progress on starting a new team and my efforts to help other schools see the importance of FIRST.

Hang on everyone, the countdown is on: it is 7 days until the FIRST kick-off.

My next post will describe what a FIRST team does, and why the kick-off is so important.