Karen Bass: “following on my friend of Rhode Island, I had the pleasure of joining him and you, Mr. Speaker, in Atlanta a week and a…”

“following on my friend of Rhode Island, I had the pleasure of joining him and you, Mr. Speaker, in Atlanta a week and a half ago to witness the 15th international FIRST Competition. It was truly an extraordinary experience. There were 1,133 teams represented there, 904 of them were returning teams, and 229 new teams there. Let me explain, as my friend from Rhode Island talked about how this works. What happens is a mentor or a company or a small businessman or anybody outside an engineer, outside of a school system, will go to a school, a high school and say they want to start a FIRST team there. You get together a group of kids, the kinds of kids that you might not see on the football field or the baseball field, the kind of kid who might not be the biggest, most popular person in the school. You get together with them, and you tell them about how you could build a robot, go to a competition, win that competition, go to a regional, go to the nationals and really do something that is exciting. This foundation was started by, as my friend from Rhode Island said, Dean Kamen, a constituent of mine from New Hampshire. Dean Kamen didn't get a college degree. He spent quite a bit of time in college, but he used the skills that were available to him to learn, what was important to learn in order to become successful, a business person, an inventor, an entrepreneur, and obviously an engineer and a physicist.…”