TI engineer Rachel Moore (right) lends her time and expertise as she mentors students participating in the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Dallas' FIRST Robotics team.

When the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Dallas sent out a "call for help," seeking mentors for the organization's FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team last year, TI engineers Rachel Moore and Jacob Borgeson answered.

"I caught the fever," said Borgeson, who previously worked as TI's liaison with FIRST but jumped at the opportunity for a more "hands on experience" so he could help inspire students to become engineers.

"I want to help them develop an appreciation for the value in an engineering degree," Borgeson said. "Today, it seems so many people are focused on sports heroes or being a famous singer, but nobody is praised for innovation. I want these kids to see the value in building and designing custom solutions that impact society in positive ways."

Moore, who also started volunteering as a team mentor last year, said "this is a tremendously fun way to volunteer my time."

"Sometimes at our jobs, because of the day-to-day work, we can lose our edge or our passion for what it is we are really here to do, make things," she said. "The FRC six-week dash to design-prototype-build-repeat process is very re-invigorating for me as well as an exciting learning experience for the students."

TI has been a FIRST sponsor for four years, and numerous employees have donated their time helping to mentor participants. On average, each FIRST mentor spends 150-200 hours a year volunteering for their team over a four- to five- month period. The company also donates microcontrollers and other devices that come in a robotics kit for their designs.

The teams are challenged to build and program robots to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors. This year, the FIRST teams have six weeks to build a robot to take part in a three-on-three basketball game called "Rebound Rumble."

This is the second year the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Dallas, a United Way of Metropolitan Dallas partner agency, has organized a team to compete in the FRC, and the TI mentor team has grown to four this year.

By participating in the FIRST program and working alongside professionals, students gain a better appreciation for the value of science and technology in their day-to-day lives, Moore said.

"Do you realize none of these kids probably even remember a time before cell phones? The world is more interconnected and dependent on technology than ever before, yet it seems like our culture's recognition and respect for these advancements is disappearing, and that's a problem," she said. "If today's technology doesn't inspire the next generation of inventors, then we are going to turn in to a culture of all consumers and no producers."

Moore said students have less and less hands-on time in the classroom to find out what their passions are, but the FRC program and team mentors help fill in the gaps when the path from the technique to the product is sometimes unclear.

"Trigonometry isn't too boring and tedious when you are working out your robot's lay-up shot angle. And programming isn't so hard when you're excited about making your robot score a basketball hoop all by itself," she said.

Borgeson said that while mentoring the students, he sees a lot of "light bulb moments" when the students figure out the solution to a problem on their own.

"We're there to challenge them and make them think," he said. "It's not us doing it for them that inspires them. It's when they have that moment and realize they are capable of things they never thought possible."

Cherri Rowe, the team coordinator at the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Dallas, said last year's team consisted of ten inner city high school students who never considered science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to be relevant in their lives.

"They all agreed to join the robotics team because they thought it would be cool to tell their friends that they built a robot," she said "They had no interest in engineering or math, and none of them had ever used power tools before. We knew that we had a long road ahead of us, but we were committed to introducing them to all of the fun and opportunities that STEM has to offer."

Two of last year's rookie team members are now freshmen in college majoring in medicine and computer science. One of the participants has plans to use her robotics experience towards a career in the Air Force and two team members have expressed that they would like to be engineers.

Moore said the most important thing she hopes to contribute to the students is to know they are capable and they can learn to do or be whatever they want.

"If they can go from never having used a screwdriver to building a robot in six weeks, then they should feel empowered to control their future."