Why FIRST?

FIRST was started over 15 years ago by inventor Dean Kamen. He felt that Americans were idolizing sports stars and pop culture to the point that we were beginning to suffer with respect to science and technology. His philosophy was, we need to create an activity for young people, where they could idolize scientists and engineers, and direct their endeavors toward a future where they'd be best equipped to solve problems. He is absolutely correct and that is why I devote a lot of my time to helping FIRST and students on FIRST teams.

I feel that we (Americans) are losing the lead on science and technology breakthroughs. We've stifeled creativity at the educational level and that is no longer blossoming into a rich creative group of scientists and engineers. We need them badly.

FIRST is all about letting students be creative along with learning real-world skills to solve engineering problems. This set of skills is what we need to solve many of the problems we are facing today.

I try to read a few blogs every day; most of them are related to either science or astronomy. I just finished reading a post regarding the distant star Betelgeuse. The post went into a lot of detail regarding the discovery of a bow shock that was recently imaged around the star. To me, this is wickedly cool. It shows that there is some sort of interstellar medium surrounding the star (not just a vacuum, like I learned in school). That aside, what device made this discovery you ask? It was Akari, a Japanese satellite observatory.

Americans have fallen into a rut, and believe that everything new that is discovered or invented comes from our great land. Not so.

Congratulations to Japan. Maybe the next discovery will be from the US of A... maybe not. This is why we need FIRST.