Woody started speaking from the podium before my dessert fork even touched the caramel covered cube of chocolate in the plate before me. I was among hundreds of "Special Invitee" dinner guests at a banquet celebrating the 25^th year of FIRST. FIRST is an organization that promotes science and technology games and contests – mostly involving student-created robots engineered out of anything from sheet metal to Lego blocks. It's a wonderful group and if you and your child aren't involved in it, you should be.

Woody Flowers, Dean Kaman and the rest of the FIRST youth supporters, repeated this same mantra before the hall filled with corporate sponsors, university admissions officers and team mentors. "We got that!" ended each different speaker. What FIRST has "got" is a cultural infrastructure that gets kids excited about solving problems across the world.

Doesn't that sound nice? "FIRST trains the next generation to solve the problems caused by this generation." I thought it pretty much summed up the whole FIRST experience. After all, isn't necessity the mother of invention? And we certainly have a long list of problems that need solving in a way only engineers are best suited to solve. And I would argue that would include problems of the "social" variety, too, not just the physical problems you might normally assume to be the exclusive domain of engineers and engineering