Building Colorado’s 21^st Century Technology Workforce

Competing robots, explosive enthusiasm, creative ingenuity, cutting edge technology ... "equal parts NCAA finals, NASA launch, and rock concert."

A more than 10-year decline in college engineering enrollments is hollowing-out the very asset that enabled our country’s wealth and security.  NASA and the Aerospace sector alone project imminent workforce retirement losses up to 50%. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics program that has proven impact on this problem by creating the same excitement for math, science and technology as our kids have for sports stars and celebrity entertainers.  That is why many of Colorado’s most respected companies are rallying to bring it to Colorado to insure Colorado’s future workforce.

With mentors from industry and universities, students have just six weeks to design and build a robot from a standard kit of parts to compete with over 1,100 other teams at 33 FIRST Regional Competitions in FIRST’s culture of “gracious professionalism.”  Along the way, these kids discover that learning can be fun – and, exciting!  For elementary and middle schoolers, there is FIRST LEGO League (FLL).

FIRST graduates are highly regarded - “best-of-workforce.”  That is why more than 40 universities offer more than 330 scholarships aggregating almost $8 million annually and the mentoring and sponsoring companies all seek to employ them.  FIRST attracts many of the best and brightest kids in the country and reaches to the underserved – all with life, culture, and community-changing impact.  As reported in the Denver press:  "A former gang member is now studying aerospace at the University of California, Berkeley.  A young woman whose mother was homeless attends Princeton.  Both were participants in the nationwide FIRST program, which just launched in Colorado."

And, Colorado already has its own stories:

• In just 5 years, we went from 3 to 29 Colorado teams. We hosted 48 teams at the fifth FIRST Colorado Regional Competition.

• Kids are winning scholarships.

• Drop-outs are back in the classroom.

• Disparate groups – of Hispanic kids, of Anglo kids, of auto-shop kids, of top students – that had always passed unknowingly of each other – are, now, united in a common purpose – as though it had always been that way.

• An inner-city teacher who didn't want to do FIRST got in by pure accident, now, describes his "renewal as a teacher."  All his experience had been kids weren’t interested.  For 12 years, teaching had been “the drain of having to push at the kids.”  Suddenly, kids so wanted to learn that they were pulling from him – where there had been mostly teaching, there was now true learning – and, new energy.

• Parents are convinced their kid has been inhabited by some alien life form: suddenly, getting up in the morning; organizing her own day – schoolwork, personal obligations and robotics; working every moment with incredible enthusiasm; actually talking with his parents – arriving home to share the team's latest accomplishments.

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