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" What do you think is the most important science and technology issue to be addressed by the next president? What&amp;#039;s the biggest issue he should take on? Is it energy? Genomics? Is it bird flu? Is it the polar capsare they really melting? Is it terrorism? You pick the crisis du jour: The answer to all these issues is going to be an educated, competent global society. This country ought to lead the world, for lots of reasons. And we ought to help the rest of the world get educated, because if they are educated, their impact on the environment is actually way less. If they are educated, they&amp;#039;ll have better ideas than killing each other or killing you and me.   The next president should recognize the power of technology. Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we&amp;#039;ll build an environment that&amp;#039;s sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it. You know, people always talk about rights in this countryI wish we had a bill of responsibilities. So I think the president has to stop thinking of the crisis du jour and say, &amp;quot;In this race between education and catastrophe, we need education to win.&amp;quot; The next president better make sure that all kids are part of the solution, not part of the problem. And with 50 percent of the kids in the 20 largest school districts in the country not graduating high school, they&amp;#039;re part of the problem. This is unsustainable. It has to change.  It seems that the kids learn and enjoy the FIRST robot-building process at the same time. What do you think FIRST could teach the educational system about the process of engaging kids, so they actually learn without it being a chore? This might shock you, but I don&amp;#039;t think FIRST can or wants to teach the educational system anything. Every other model that you&amp;#039;ve seen where industry has tried to do that, you end up with the corporate world and the government world being at odds. We don&amp;#039;t want to be an educational institution, and we don&amp;#039;t believe we can educate the kids.   I would argue that education, actual learningit is hard work. It&amp;#039;s very personal. Your parents don&amp;#039;t teach you anything. Your teachers don&amp;#039;t teach you anything. The government doesn&amp;#039;t teach you anything. You read it. You don&amp;#039;t understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again. What parents do, and what teachers doin a culture that isn&amp;#039;t full of distractionsis guide kids where to put that time and attention, that mental sweat.   What teachers and parents and FIRST can do is give kids the inspiration that will allow them to work really hard at doing something important. FIRST makes the fun stuff. We want to be Shaquille O&amp;#039;Neal and the Super Bowl. We want to be an aspirational, inspirational thing that will be an influence on kids that says, &amp;quot;If I&amp;#039;m really willing to work really hard, day after day for 10 years of my life, the world is my oyster. I can do these things. I have choices.&amp;quot; You get to 18 years old in this country, and if you&amp;#039;re one of the five best ball-bouncers, you have a nice job in the NBA. If you&amp;#039;re the sixth-best ball-bouncer, your options in life are, &amp;quot;Would you like fries with that?&amp;quot; If you look at the distribution of skill sets, and the amount of time and energy kids put into things, we&amp;#039;re cheating kids if they spend 10 years chasing an illusion. They need an understanding of what matters and what&amp;#039;s important. One of your FIRST mentors uses the term &amp;quot;gracious professionalism,&amp;quot; and it seems to underpin a lot of the philosophy at FIRST. What does it mean? I love the sports model, right down to regionals and locals and little league and celebrations. Everything we do is modeled after sports, because in our culture, we&amp;#039;re obsessed with them. The problem is, when they&amp;#039;re not on the news for winning and losing, sports people are on the news for drugs, abuse, murder, rape, graft, corruption or winning at all costs. It&amp;#039;s not a happy place. In the early days, I was deathly afraid we&amp;#039;d succeed, and all the negative trappings of sports would come into our sport. In our sport, they&amp;#039;re learning something that&amp;#039;s way too serious for the nonsense that&amp;#039;s in other sports. They&amp;#039;re not learning how to bounce a ball. They&amp;#039;re learning how to think, and solve problems, and become serious citizens who are going to inherit the future. We&amp;#039;ve got to make everything in our sport live to a higher standard, so we use the term &amp;quot;gracious professionalism.&amp;quot; We want to keep the sport fiercely competitive, but they have to help each other. They work in the pits supplying parts to each other. The judges&amp;#039; awards are for &amp;quot;the team that helps the next team.&amp;quot; The whole culture around FIRST is people helping each other.  The FIRST robots are sophisticated. This is not something that the average kid&amp;#039;s going to pull together in his basement, unless that kid is Dean Kamen. There&amp;#039;s programming involved; there are a lot of hands-on mechanical skills needed. How do you make the FIRST robotics competitions accessible to kids who don&amp;#039;t have any experience building machines? We work really hard to &amp;quot;ambivalence-scale&amp;quot; our competition, as we call it. We create a competition where there&amp;#039;s a lot of luck added to it. The rounds are only 2 minutes long; the scoring system isn&amp;#039;t particularly fair. It favors, throughout each round, the underdog. We do that because we wanted to be like real sports, which are made to have a lot of luck in them. If they weren&amp;#039;t, you&amp;#039;d only need one game to decide the World Seriesthe best team would win. We did everything we could to make it fun enough that if your robot didn&amp;#039;t win, it&amp;#039;s not a personal thing. You build the kits in a way that people who aren&amp;#039;t very sophisticated in technology can at least build a reasonable robot. We deliberately give them enough premade stuff that they won&amp;#039;t feel intimidated. Anybody who really wants to compete can do it and still have fun and learn a lot even with a basic robot. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a3734/4289466/>