2005 NCTI Conference Keynote Address

NCTI was honored to have Dean Kamen as its 2005 Keynote speaker. He spoke on the subject of FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”), a multinational non-profit organization he founded in 1989, that aspires to transform culture, by connecting young people to the excitement and challenge of science, math, engineering, and technology.

Dean Kamen is the inventor of the Segway Human Transporter among many other creations. He holds more than 150 U.S. and foreign patents, many of them for innovative medical devices that have expanded the frontiers of health care worldwide, others, like the IBOT personal transporter designed for the disabled community, representing extraordinarily innovative responses to extraordinarily daunting challenges.

Link to Dean Kamen's Biography.

Keynote Address by Dean Kamen
Founder, FIRST, and President, DEKA Research and Development Corporation

Dean Kamen has created inventions that have advanced medical care worldwide, and has been a leader in awakening young people to the excitement of science and technology. His vast knowledge of the physical sciences, combined with his ability to integrate the fundamental laws of physics with the most modern technologies, has led to the development of breakthrough processes and products.

Kamen’s intertwined roles as inventor and advocate, and his prominence as an outstanding innovator make him a hero to many among NCTI’s constituency. When asked to address the NCTI Conference, he said he would do so on the condition that he would speak, not about his own accomplishments and awards, but about FIRST, the international robotics competition that Kamen founded, continues to spearhead, and which has introduced hundreds of thousands of young people to thinking about science and technology—as a competitive sport.

FIRST, above all else, encourages young people to be entrepreneurs: people who restate problems so that others can see the problem in a new way—often a way that can lead to very simple solutions for complex problems. An entrepreneur, we think, is a person who takes something that might not have seemed important—and reveals how it can be used to achieve great ends.

Specifically, FIRST encourages young people to engage in and seriously participate in the field of science and technology. Their lack of participation is currently an area of some concern. For the past 15 to 20 years, the United States has debated the slide of its students’ achievement in math and science. The presumption is that it’s an education problem, and what we need is more teachers and more standardized tests.

FIRST says, to the contrary, it is not an educational problem. It is a problem of culture. It’s not a problem of supply—it’s a lack of demand. It’s not about what there is too little of; it’s about what there is too much of—too many rock stars and basketball stars being role models for our children. These are people who add no value to society and yet our young people want desperately to grow up and be like them. In addition to being a bad idea, this is a cruel illusion. Millions of children want to make the varsity squad because they believe that someday they will play in the NBA. That outcome is unlikely to occur—indeed, too often, being on the varsity will lead them nowhere.

How can we help them to want to be on the math team instead of the varsity? How can we give them different role models, different experience, and an awareness of their own immense potential?

FIRST set out to give kids a sense of what’s important. We want them to understand what has made this nation a world leader, how the nation they live in is great because of the mastery of technology, from steel to the light bulb to the theory of relativity to biotechnology.

Since we live in a media-driven culture, we decided to use the tools of the media and wholesale marketing to make science and engineering fun, more than fun. We decided to make thinking and creating and using the laws of physics and engineering as exciting as being on the varsity. And we asked the people who understand this excitement—scientists and engineers and the companies that prosper from their work—to help us with the project.

The project is FIRST—a Robotics Competition where robots connect kids to serious adults in something that’s fun and profoundly worthwhile.

We took the idea to the CEOs of the top corporations and technology companies. We asked them to let FIRST use their people, men and women that would be the right kinds of heroes for these kids. The first year, twenty-three CEOs agreed to lend FIRST engineers for eight weeks, to start this great experiment, to contribute to the community and, they hoped, to prepare and create their future workforce.

FIRST trained the engineers—how they should work with students, to help them and challenge them, to engage and excite them. The engineers returned to their homes, identified and partnered with schools. They worked with the students, rediscovering in the process many of the reasons they chose engineering as a profession. They brought the kids to their workplaces, to let them see how science and technology can be applied to all kinds of problems. Six weeks after the engineers came to the schools, FIRST held a Robotics tournament.

The tournament was intense and competitive, the robots embodied engineering design solutions that were brilliant, the kids had fun—and their lives were changed forever. And the engineers became company heroes.

That was the first year. The tournament got larger—until they had one thousand teams, and they had to go to the Georgia Dome to find a place big enough for the event. The year following the event at the Georgia Dome, FIRST was forced to hold regional events in order to meet the overwhelming demand for the program.

Now, FIRST holds thirty regional events. This year nearly 25,000 high-school-aged young people, on close to 1,000 teams, competed, from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, Mexico, the U.K., and almost every U.S. state.

When younger kids heard about FIRST and saw the robots and the tournaments, they wanted in. They started the Lego League with fifty or sixty schools the first year. Now, in the fifth year, they have 7,500 schools.

To fill the gap between the young kids in Lego League and the high-school students in the Robotics Competition, they created the VEX League, for kids between elementary and high school. Last year, thanks to a partnership with Radio Shack, they shipped 10,000 VEX kits.

Finally, what is FIRST about?

FIRST creates high-tech spectator sporting events, the result of lots of focused brainstorming, real-world teamwork, dedicated mentoring, project timelines, and deadlines.

But at its core, FIRST is about creating a situation where there is no right answer, no right strategy. FIRST is about seeing how, if you give young people, boys and girls, students of all races, faiths, and nationalities—open-ended problems and a lot of resources, they will invent answers and strategies that were never imagined before, let alone created. They will want to become—and they will have the ability to become—the scientists and the engineers of the future.

One comment, among others, was that “FIRST does what Dean Kamen wants the young people to do. If entrepreneurship is taking something nobody else notices, seeing it in a new way, and making something amazing out of it—that’s what FIRST does with those kids.”