In 1989, renowned inventor Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway, began to inspire high school students to pursue careers in math, science, and technology through a fun and engaging robotics competition known as FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics.
Today, the FIRST Robotics program reaches out to thousands of young people nationwide who come from diverse environments and backgrounds to pursue careers in innovation fields. In offering a new level of experiential learning to students, this wildly successful program has delivered a corps of skilled, well-rounded professionals to our economy, and in some cases has been a great talent pipe-line for some CBIA members.
FIRST Connecticut has become very strong in recent years due to the generous support from members like Northeast Utilities, ebm-papst and United Technologies. These and other memebrs support FIRST in various ways such as financial donations to help defray competition costs and they donate materials to help build the robots. Our members also allow their employees to serve as mentors to teams in their communities and share engineering knowledge.
This coming Friday and Saturday, the 2011 Northeast Utilities FIRST Connecticut Regional competition will take place at the Convention Center in Hartford. If you like technology and sports with some hip music, then this might be something for you to check out. Students from all over the eastern part of the country and in some cases, from other countries will compete for top honors and try to advance to the national championship in Atlanta later this month.
For more information about the 2011 Northeast Utilities FIRST Connecticut Regional, visit FIRST-CT’s web site.
