Global robotics community prepares students

 

POSTED ON Jun 21, 2022

 

Many companies and organizations around the world are opening doors for young people who want to get involved in STEM professions. Some students are missing these opportunities because they don’t have the mentors to guide them through achieving a career in STEM.

FIRST is a global nonprofit that provides robotics-based programs and mentorship from adult volunteers such as educators and STEM professionals to students ages 4 to 18. The organization aims to get kids excited about careers in STEM by building these talents, along with critical life skills such as communication and leadership, through team-based robotics competitions.

Kids in the program build useful life skills and have fun doing it by being involved in robotics competitions. Nearly 700,000 students and 320,000 adult mentors, coaches, judges and volunteers participate in the nonprofit community year over year. The program was featured in the 2022 Disney+ documentary “More Than Robots.”

Fazlul “Fuzz” Zubair, systems engineering department manager at Raytheon Technologies, mentors FIRST Team 4201, The Vitruvian Bots, in Los Angeles. Zubair has hired 15 Raytheon Technologies employees from his FIRST team, providing pathways for STEM careers.

“Here, at FIRST, it’s a sport where everyone can go pro. They can come out of this program, and they can get a good-paying job and contribute positively to society and solve the tough problems that we have,” Zubair told Upworthy.

Kids in the FIRST program are acquiring real-life skills that will prepare them for future careers in STEM and Zubair is guiding them to success.

“Raytheon Technologies understands this, so it supports students in the program and its employees who mentor. Through FIRST, we’ve created a pipeline of people who already know how to collaborate with engineers and when they come into our companies, they have a head start,” Zubair said.