- We are joined by Dean Kamen,
inventor, innovator, and
the founder of FIRST.
Thank you so much for
having us here today.
- Thank you for being here,
and thanking you in advance
for helping us promote FIRST.
- Well first, let's start
with FIRST, what is FIRST?
- FIRST, the word, For
Inspiration and Recognition
of Science and Technology, is
a not-for-profit organization
I put together 30 years ago this year,
to do exactly what our name says.
Why do we take the things that kids
need to get passionate
about, understanding math,
and science, and analytic thinking,
and put it, wrap it, in
the context of a sport?
Make it entertaining, take
it out of the requirement,
make it aspirational,
make it after school,
make it something where
at the end of the season
they don't get a final exam,
they get a double elimination
tournament, you don't get to 18 years old,
say, okay, now they're out of school,
I'll stop with the
sports and entertainment.
I'll go have a career, it's too late.
You don't say at 18 years old
I'm gonna take up a sport.
It's too late.
We tell all these kids,
we're the only sport
where every kid on
every team can turn pro.
- Now you mentioned that
you really want to focus
on getting this education
to a very young audience.
When you go in and look at these teams,
what is the youngest
group that you go after?
- We started with high
school, because we said
high school kids ought to start learning
the real engineering skills they need
and they can be mentored by
real engineers from industry
that can come in and
work with the schools.
But after a couple of years,
you'd go to the events,
and there in the stands,
the fans would be the
younger brothers and sisters
of the people on the first team.
In the same way that all little kids
want to do what their
older brothers and sisters
do in any other sport,
they wanted to do first.
So we now have a total of four programs
from kindergarten right
up through high school
and college, but we are
FIRST LEGO League Junior,
FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge,
and FIRST Robotics.
- Can you tell us a little
bit about the upcoming season?
- So we have a strong
partnership with NASA,
it's the 50th anniversary
of people on the moon,
so we said, this coming year,
all four of our programs
will be themed on space, and
it will be very exciting.
- It sounds very exciting.
I'm looking forward to
this upcoming season.
Thank you so much for having us today.
- You're very welcome.
