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�Why are you playing with robots?� If you�re like many FIRST � participants you�ve undoubtedly been asked this question when your friends or family hear about your robotics team. Everyone understands �team� and most know what a robot is, but many can�t connect how you might be competing and assume you�re just playing with technology. It�s not a big step from that to simply categorizing your efforts as a geeky outlet. �Good for Marissa, she�s playing with robots�� But what you want them to know is through these �geeky� robotics competitions, FIRST is developing future innovators, technology leaders, and creative problem solvers. You and your team are channeling your raw curiosity to think critically and seek ways to improve the world around   you � and you�re having fun while doing it. At, FIRST we fight this same battle against projections like this. Amplifying the FIRST experience, expanding access to our programs, and convincing sponsors and volunteers to join the mission. How...

2016 Dean�s List Winner, Colleen Johnson explains how the skills she has learned participating in FIRST programs has changed her perception of herself, what she can accomplish, and her goals for the future. FIRST has changed my life. You hear that sentence over and over again, tens, or even hundreds of times, at different FIRST events, but let�s take a moment to really step back and think about what those words mean.   FIRST has taught me so many different valuable lessons, and helped me identify such a wide variety of passions, that I honestly don't know where I would be without it. Now, before we go any further, there�s something you should know. I love to create videos.   Training videos, advertisements, audition tapes, dumb little videos with my friends, whatever.   And I�ll talk about how FIRST helped me discover that a bit later, but for right now I want you to imagine this.   A young girl sits in the middle of the Smart Move FIRST LEGO League course ...

2016 Dean�s List Winner Luz Moreno explains how the skills she has learned participating in FIRST programs has changed her perception of herself, what she can accomplish, and her goals for the future. If you would have asked me five years ago what my plans were for college, I would have laughed and explained to you how college �is just not for me�. I was always told that once I turned fifteen I would become just another number on a graph. I never had college in mind until I started my FIRST team back in the fall of 2014. During our first competition with an incomplete robot, a referee asked me my plans for college and I stayed silent because I had no answer to it. What do I say? What should I say? So many thoughts were going through my mind, and not having an answer terrified me. I cannot thank that referee enough, he gave me a pamphlet about the FIRST Scholarship Program and said: �I know you will do great here in the FIRST Tech Challenge, welcome to the family�. He was the first ...