Why Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Is Helping Kids Build Robots
Headlines:
Dean Kamen's FIRST nonprofit has focused on STEM education for decades. Now it's bringing robots to classrooms.
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, is on a mission to inspire. He's most famous for creating the two-wheeled, self-balancing vehicle unveiled in 2001, but Kamen's real legacy can be found elsewhere: in engineering teams across the United States, and the thousands of engineers he's brought into the tech industry over the past 36 years.
Since 1989, Kamen has been building FIRST , a nonprofit focused on teaching STEM skills to kids through robotics . FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) hosts thousands of events globally each year. If your high school had a robotics team, this is the competition they were probably attending. According to Kamen, over 3.4 million students have been directly involved in FIRST since its inception.
Kamen started FIRST in the late 1980s because he wanted to solve what he saw as a growing crisis in education: People weren't entering the engineering and technology industries at the same level as earlier generations, and women and people of color were barely present in those industries. Kamen theorizes that this was because of a lack of inspiration—kids are so inundated with sports and entertainment that they grow up wanting to be athletes and actors. But what if Kamen could make robotics and engineering seem inspiring, or even cool? As he told Inc. last year, "you get the best of what you celebrate."
This is in part why Kamen decided on the acronym FIRST . "I've never seen kids at a sporting event running around cheering 'I want to be second!'" says Kamen, who believes that competition inspires kids far more effectively than a pass or fail on a math test. "We want to be competing for their heart and soul—we don't need another science fair!"
Now, Kamen has set his sights on a new goal: bringing FIRST from being an after-school activity to being a classroom staple. Last year, former New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu announced plans to bring robotics kits created in partnership with FIRST to every classroom in the state.
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