Since this seems like it's going to morph into a thread about FRC... I started and mentored a FIRST team at our local high school this year. It was a great experience, but the thing I keep wondering is if an equivalent experience could be offered for less money? I can already see that this is going to turn into a yearly scramble for money.
I do fundraising for a team that is 13 or 14 years old. We raise a lot of money each year and it is always hard. Plus the parents put in a lot of money. Or at least some do. The less affluent schools have a harder time. That said I have seem some great robots come out off underserved schools.
I do have to say that after 6 years of mentoring this FRC team (my last child is aging out), I am looking forward to going back to being a FLL, FTC and FRC volunteer and no longer doing team mentoring. I started volunteering 11 years ago.
I'm looking forward to getting involved in these other programs. My oldest is excited to join her school's team next year. She'll be entering the 3rd grade. I'm not familiar with how anything outside of FRC works. But I'm probably going to be busy finding time to help her team and my FRC team.
FLL is the best program to start with at 9 years old. The balance between robots, research, presentations and core values gives students of all sorts a chance to grow.
I coached FLL 4 years and I stay in touch with most of the students. They grew and continue to grow from FLL. The ones that go on to FTC or FRC are amazing young adults.
The FIRST program is a cornerstone of what I spend my outside of work time on. I will continue as a volunteer now that we are aging out.
Same here. I started our team back in 2001. I just returned this year to mentor that same team. I love the program and attribute a lot of my career choice to it.
WOW have things grown and changed. Some for the better but some were... disappointing. The biggest issues are always about money and team size. The program constantly reemphasizes that it's not about winning or the trophies. But that's kind of hard to do when so much attention is placed on aggressive competition and it's the same well-endorsed teams winning every year. Especially with this year's challenge. I've also discovered this questionable practice of teams flying in from far away to participate in a regional where they think they have a better chance.
Our team won it's first regional EVER this year. It took us 15 years. We just never had the funds or man hours to build any of the amazing ideas the students had. I'm proud of our students. But I wish there was a way to even the playing field and let students focus on the innovation rather than if their bot will literally fall apart on the field.
I think FIRST should stick to full cooperative game modes and ones that don't require lots of refs to determine points. This year is a mess and full of people complaining about points that the refs completely failed to give. For a organization that encourages automation there sure are a lot of things handled by error-prone humans. :)
Just wanted to chime in and echo the recommendations for VEX. VEX Robotics Competition (VRC) is an order of magnitude less expensive than FRC and having been heavily involved in both I can tell you that the students get just as much, if not more, out of VRC. The smaller team size means that the kids can be much more hands-on as well versus FRC where you have huge teams of 50-100 kids but only 10-20 who are really involved in the engineering part. For less money in VRC, 50 kids could be split into 8-10 teams and every kid could be working on the robot.
Also, for the younger kids, VEX IQ Challenge is a great alternative to FIRST Lego League. It's even less expensive than VEX and the kids actually get to drive the robot (unlike FLL) - which is a huge plus for many kids.
Coincidentally, the VEX World Championships are coming up next week. Anyone thinking about getting into robotics competitions should check it out. They do a great live webcast of the events. Friday and Saturday (April 22-23) are the best days to watch. Webcasts and other details should be available here: http://www.robotevents.com/championship/
This is my third year as a volunteer mentor for a local FRC team since the team's founding. Also, it is our third year headed to St. Louis (FIRST Championships). Our team is run out of an elite private school. We participate in multiple regionals and money has never been a problem. I'm sure the easy access to money is a contributing factor for our continued success.
I'm aware of another local team which is setup as a 501c3 and physically runs out of a public school. This particular team is heavily supported by a local mechanical engineering firm with both money and a team of mechanical engineering mentors.
Our team is from a public school. We have a manufacturer that sponsor's us with space and tools but not money. We have a variety of sponsors that provide funds and we raise our own money as well. All funds go into a 501c3 that is a "boosters club".
Our public school is somewhat affluent but not like a private school might be. We took first place in two district events this year and entered the quarterfinals in the district championship but only won one match. Our robot was good one other year since 2010.
Our teams primary focus is outreach, helping disadvantaged / underserved students with STEM. We just had a big success with writing a state senate bill to help fund STEM competition teams at schools that have 40% of the students that qualify for the free lunch. The bill went into law this weekend. We had three students actually write the bill and a state senator promoted the bill under his name. The senator lives about 100 miles form our team. So really a state effort.
We won Chairman's at the District Championship for our outreach. That gets us to Worlds in St. Louis. Without the Chairman's win and without the robot I love that we do outreach. My daughter is going to do a gap year this year before college and do a Americorps VISTA job for FIRST robotics helping the underserved start and fund teams. This is the best part of what FIRST creates for young adults.
I was reading my reply and this does not sound right:
>We have a manufacturer that sponsor's us with space and tools but not money.
We love our primary sponsor. Without space and tools we could not do our work. While we need to raise funds also the space is big and the tools amazing (CNC, welding, grinding, bandsaw, lathe and a lot more).
VEX is arguably the manifestation of this philosophy. The team I mentor has multiple VEX teams along with a flagship FRC team. VEX offers a good deal of the excitement, learning opportunities, and more student autonomy for a small fraction of the cost. I'll always be loyal to FRC but for schools that currently run a struggling FRC program, it's almost certainly true that they could be running multiple VEX teams and involving more students for less money.
I mentored a Chicago South Side school for four FRC competitions. During the last two two years I was trying to persuade them not to join. This year they didn't participate, but not because of my wisdom, the physics teacher who was driving it left the school.
Participating in FRC has many benefits, which has been discussed and pushed at great length. What's not usually discussed is the huge opportunity cost, especially for poorer schools with severely limited resources, like the school I mentored at. Here are a few observations from four years of FRC mentoring with Team 1850:
1) MONEY. Participation is $5k. To this, add the extra money teachers get for their mentorship, travel costs to the competition, pizza, etc. for the kids during the days of competition. For our school I think this added up to approximately $10k conservatively. For larger teams, the cost could be many times this amount.
2) TIME. Due to the very tight schedule (why the schedule is so tight is a whole another discussion) the teachers who oversee team development have to relentless focus on pushing the build further, rather than teach kids good practices, foster teamworks, etc. At our school a typical season was meeting for 1-1.5 hrs off season (~September - December) then 3-4 hours during the day plus 6-7 hours on Saturdays during build season. Adding in the competition, conservatively that is 70-80 hours of team time. Our team was about 10 regulars (a small team, good teams, e.g. 101 Wildstang has more than 50 students actively working). That's conservatively 700-800 hours of student time alone. Adding teacher time (2 teachers generally present), this was near 1000 hours for one season.
3) MENTOR TIME. For schools like the one I worked with mentors are a very precious resource, because no one wants to drive from the city or suburbs 45mins to the school on Saturdays. That's why almost all good FRC Teams I observed are in from the suburbs. Again due to the cut throat schedule, I wasn't able to interact much with the students but just worked on the C++ code.
Now, you have to ask yourself if the the benefits from FRC, which are substantial, are worth the immense costs associated with it, or if these can be diverted to other efforts instead. For example, I had the school but 10 rPis and started to teach kids programming using Python and pygame, they loved it! Unfortunately, most of the students that came were also on the robotics team so we had to stop when FRC work started.
Our team didn't make it to the finals in the 4 years I mentored. The cause was the same: A poorly designed hardware component failing. Pitted against us were teams that had retired aerospace and mechanical engineers from Boeing and other such companies who developed their designs using CAD and sometimes tested their designs using their old company resources. We had NO CHANCE! This was the "torture of hope": each year we started with great motivation and told the students that if they worked hard they can get a good standing, where in reality they had nearly zero chance of that happening.
A lot of people seem to appreciate Kamen for FRC so I would like to offer my alternative experience: I enjoyed the comradery that came with my high school robotics club, but man I did I absolutely hate the actual competitions. Firstly, being fairly experienced at programming meant that I wasn't doing anything interesting. They tried to make computer vision a focus, but autonomous mode never lasted long enough for it to ever matter in point values.
Secondly, it's hardly "competitive". The people that win these competitions are the people from the richest neighborhoods. When I competed in the Bay Area pretty much every regional was won by the cheesy poofs. Why? They literally got NASA Ames to build them their robot.
Thirdly, the actual games are incredibly stupid. My first year in highschool the competition was just soccer. It was a simple, well established, competitive game, and the tournaments were fun for it. Every year subsequent had a game way more ridiculous than the last year's.
Many times agreed. I'm fairly sure the computer vision stuff was pushed by NI because heavy sponsorship. And one of the recent games, Aerial Assist, was actually fun... because it was focused on the interaction between robots and teamwork between them, and because even a Kit-O-Parts robot with nothing else on it was a valuable asset when driven correctly.
FRC was fun because of the people. Not because of FRC.
I'm going to second your comment. My experience in FRC has only been worthwhile because of the people I've met. I suppose it's a form of networking, but quite legitimately having a team that drives for one goal together, not in either a "corporate" or "anti-corporate" but rather in a "this is cool" way, is inspiring.
I have to agree with you but as someone who was on a small team with basically no mentors, the amount we learned by having to do all the hard work ourselves was amazing. Really wish we didn't run out of funding my senior year.
FIRST has had a massive impact on my life, as a student and now a mentor, I believe it can be a engine for change. 3/4 co-founders of our company (Taplytics W14) are FIRST alumni.
How's his water purifier doing? Lots of press coverage up to 2012, then silence. It worked, but the cost of the prototypes was insanely high. It was supposed to become cheap.
"In 2011, Coke and Deka sent 15 Slingshots to Ghana for a six-month field test where they provided clean water to five rural schools. In fall 2013, Coke and its partners announced a goal to place up to 2,000 units (either standalone Slingshots or Ekocenters) around Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the end of 2015."
My youngest is a senior in High School and will be getting a Engineering degree starting in 2017. All because of FIRST Robotics started by Dean Kamen. Her mom and I are very grateful for FIRST robotics and the influence it has had on our two girls.
Dean Kamen is an amazing man. Myself and many other FIRST Alumni thank him, Woody Flowers, and countless other volunteers for creating such an amazing organization.
Key takeaways:
#### About the inventor of Segway and iBot
#### Started a large robotic competion
#### Sports vs tech - " “Most of the superstars in technology could buy the whole NBA or the whole NFL.."
#### Sold segway in 2009, won't tell what he earned
#### Thoughts about time: “I don’t want to waste any of [it]…so I like to do important things, and to me, important things are identifying problems that would be a real challenge to solve.”
#### Science vs science fiction: “The only difference between science fiction and science is timing. learning to build robots, he adds, gives students useful skills for a career in technology. “It’s the only sport where every kid can turn pro,”
Your comment is a bit ridiculous, which is why you're getting downvoted, but for different reasons my Massachusetts-based self takes Dean Kamen-related stuff with a grain of salt.
People may or may not remember, but back around 1999-2000 there was this insane, cult-like hype that his investors/hangers-on/groupies put out about how Dean Kamen had created the most revolutionary invention in world history. Nobody knew anything about it or what it was, but people were writing books about how genius mad scientist Dean Kamen was about to change human civilization forever.
Then we had the reveal that the mysterious invention was a new form of transportation. The Kamen cultists announced that it was going to replace driving. It was going to replace walking. (Yes, people actually said this).The hype soared higher than it's been for any product since, even the iPhone. People were speculating that he must have invented a hoverboard, like in Back to the Future, since that's the only thing that could have any chance of living up to the hype.
And then, in a worldwide multimedia event, on the evening news back when people watched the evening news, on the front page of every newspaper back when people read the newspaper, he unveiled… the Segway, a product that was more Hoveround than hoverboard.
Kamenmania disappeared virtually overnight. The nails were hammered into the coffin when it turned out it actually couldn't go up and down stairs as advertised, and then when George Bush fell off one. And so in my mind and many others' Kamen will forever be the Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone's vault of innovation.
http://www.slingshotdoc.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3242934/