"Why do we do FIRST? Because the world’s a mess. Read the news. Look around you. We think we have an economic crisis. You know, we got lights. We got ways to get around. You have hospitals. You have schools. I keep hearing everyone saying, 'We have an economic crisis.' 2/3s of the world, 4 billion people are living on less than two dollars a day. Half of them are living on one dollar a day. That’s not a crisis to them because that’s their whole life. You’re the richest people in the world. The world’s a mess. Somebody has to fix it. Do you think the people that are living on a buck a day, that don’t have clean water, that don’t have schools, that don’t have technology, that don’t have an education. Do you think those people can fix it? You have to fix it. It seemed to me that so many kids in this country were just ignoring that opportunity. You have access to education. You have access to technology. It seemed to me that in a culture that’s driven by media and in a culture that we’re free to celebrate whatever we want and then become good at what we celebrate. We got to find a way to start seriously convincing all kids, particularly women and minorities, in this country that they have to start celebrating stuff that matters. We have not just the opportunity, but I personally think that we have an obligation, a moral obligation to help the rest of the world, to lead to a world where the solution to problems isn’t bombing each other. Maybe the rest of the world could learn from us and coopertition could become the way we go forward. So when we started this thing we had a couple of things in mind. You’ve got to make it fun and exciting for kids to see that engineering is every bit as accessible and rewarding and fun as bouncing a ball or any of the other pastimes that have come to dominate our culture. Yes, let us obsess over distractions and nonsense while the world unwinds itself. So you have to make it fun because that’s what we’re competing with. But you have to have content. It has to be meaningful otherwise how am I going to keep getting these giant companies, foundations, government. How are we going to make them keep supporting us unless that we can prove that we’re really making a difference? So why do we do FIRST? I think it’s easy. Because I think the world needs a lot more technology, quickly and the next generation of technologists has to be able to deal with all sorts of issues. Some of which are unimaginable when I was the age of some of these kids. You’ve got to be better at it than we were, you’ve got to be faster and you’ve got to deliver, probably at an earlier age. What is FIRST? Superficially, it might look like it’s primarily a robot competition. No pun intended. The robot is just a vehicle. It’s just a tool. What we hope we’re really building here is serious relationships between serious adults." --Dean Kamen
This is generally what Dean Kamen says in the 2009 kick off, I may be missing a couple of words here and there, but I think I'm pretty close. The speech doesn't end there, you can watch the entire webcast
here. The video should be somewhere at the very bottom of that page. The topic is heavy, but I believe that he speaks the absolute truth, we do need to change our generation. We're going to need F.I.R.S.T. to fix it.
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