But not to join the forces we have now. To join the Forces we needed 5 years ago.
We need to stop with the Grunt = This is the Way BS.
We will find those people, or more exactly, they will find us. But we actually need to spend way less time trying to attract members of the wrestling / hockey / rugby team, and all of our time trying to attract (and retain) more members of the Coders Club or whatever the equivalent is. And our obvious bias towards the former drives away any hope of attracting the latter.
Diversity is not just about gender, race, ethnicity, and orientation.
We need diversity of needs, desires, experiences, lifestyles, what we value as individuals, and as an organisation. We need neurodiversity.
We can no longer make pitiful efforts to adjust the mono-culture to accept the diverse. We need to be diverse enough to accept the old mono-culture as a small but necessary subset of the wider culture.
Sheldon is the new Conan.
Conan is still necessary. But not the only answer - and in fact a very limited tool.
As some of you know, I was part and parcel of the "This is the Way" thing for multiple decades, and in my worst moments probably embodied it.
But the threat is existential, and we must adapt.
2 cents from a broken retired old dude
My kids did robotics club for awhile.
It was 'Holy Crap' Awesome.... these are definitely the kids we need to try and attract into the CAF. And there are thousands of them, all across Canada.
Now, would I (a retired CAF member) ever offer to try to connect the CAF recruiting system up with these people? Nope, never. Not based on the people and approaches I've seen used in the fairly recent past, nor based on the torturous recruiting process we generally make people suffer through.
After all, I don't want loads of complete strangers to hate my guts
About FIRST Canada
FIRST® inspires young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
Mission and Values
The mission of
FIRST® is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
Our mission
Our mission is to inspire young people to pursue further studies and careers in the field of science, technology and engineering. Our vision is of a world which celebrates success in science, technology and engineering and in which young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes. We pursue our mission primarily through running robotics competitions for school-age students at the elementary, junior high school and senior high school level.
Our motivation
We believe that as a society, we face enormous challenges and that to confront these challenges, we will need the full benefit of the energy, talent and dedication of our next generation of scientists, engineers and technologists. We believe that in any community, we encourage what we celebrate. When we celebrate success in sports, we motivate youth to excel in sports. When we celebrate success in entertainment and the arts, we motivate youth to excel as entertainers and artists.We believe it is important to celebrate, at the high school level and earlier, participation in and success in science, technology and engineering in order to inspire young people to pursue further studies and careers in these areas. We believe that our prosperity as a society is driven by our productivity. For our society to be as productive as it can be, it must be as innovative as it can be. Investing in programs that encourage young people to develop related skills is one of the most important investments our society can make.
Our values
- Gracious Professionalism™: We instill this value at every opportunity. We expect, require and reward on-field and off-field conduct that models the best values of professional respect and courtesy.
- Coopertition®: Our programs are designed so that to succeed, teams must be able to cooperate with other teams as well as compete with other teams. This is an important real world skill. The principles of “gracious professionalism™” and coopertition™ work hand in hand.
- judged awards: We make significant efforts to recognize and reward accomplishment, whether or not it is reflected in success on the playing field. We make it clear that our most prestigious awards are our judged awards. We deliberately seek judges of considerable standing and seniority (e.g., in the FRC context, university professors, engineering vice presidents) so that students know, when making presentations to such judges or when receiving an award from them, that the award is truly a meaningful one.
- Indirect learning: Our mission is to inspire, not to formally educate, but participation in one of our events involves the application of a remarkable range of creative and analytical skills, as well as the development of valuable social intelligence skills. Students must learn to problem-solve collectively, as members of a team, while under constraints of time, cost, weight, size, game rules and regulations and other restrictions.
- Learning from mentors: We believe that much valuable learning takes place when students work side to side with adult mentors who are taking time from their professional careers to share their knowledge of and enthusiasm for science, technology and engineering with students. We work hard to put strong mentoring relationships in place. We value mentors as teachers and as role models.
- Respect for diversity, inclusion and volunteerism: Participating students fully reflect the diversity of contemporary Ontario society. Our program is volunteer-led and volunteer-delivered. Part of our mandate is to encourage more young women to consider careers in science, technology and engineering and we appear to be having some success in this regard.
www.firstroboticscanada.org
