Texas Registration 2015
 

Its another year of FRC and the Texas FRC registration numbers continue to decline.
Current FRC Texas registration is around 104 teams, which is a significant drop from 132 in 2013.

Here's a chart of Texas Registration Growth since 2003
http://2013.discobots.org/node/84

On the positive side, many other STEM programs are growing quickly in Texas. If anyone would like to discuss those statistics, I would be happy to provide a few numbers.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

What is causing the loss of teams in Texas? It's rather concerning, especially as FIRST pushes for growth. Is it that teams sign up, get a NASA grant (or some other kind of grant), and then a year or two later there's no more grant, and they cease to exist any longer?

To keep this program sustainable, on a national and state level, we really need to work on funding at least the minimum annual budget requirements of FIRST teams through state and federal education funding sources for career technical education. Selling lightbulbs and getting corporate sponsorships is great, but it does not work in all areas and will not continue to work forever.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn't the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?

What is the growth of other STEM programs?

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

Here's the thread from last year that discusses the growth from 2009-2012:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=120776

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

The JCP spike is the 2011 season. At least, for most of the US. Unless they started sponsoring teams in Texas earlier.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

I thought it due to the TWC program? They were promoting new teams in Texas for two years, correct?

FIRST and UIL/Texas are talking and the TEA is approving or starting to approve more robotics classes. In our district robotics classes and computer science classes can now count as math and science credits. For the FIRST (pun intended) time this year there is an official STEM track for a high school diploma. This is only a rumor but I think AP Computer Science 2 qualifies as a foreign language credit! Plus we now have a Cyber Patriot team and our sister high school (Rockwall-Heath High School, home of FRC 3310) won an International Rocketry Competition in 2013. This is all in the last few years.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

The spike in growth was related to JCPenny and the TWC grants. The decline of team registrations is not as clear.

Many of these numbers include multiple sub-teams inside a single school.

FTC in Texas :
81 teams in 2009 season
300 teams in 2013 season

VEX (VRC) in Texas:
106 teams in 2009-2010 season
562 teams in 2013-2014 Season

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

Follow the money, Andy. A lot of teams were almost totally reliant on that funding. There's a reason only 13 of the 50 2009 rookies are still around. Only two of us have WFFA winners, and only 2 or 3 have at least one regional victory. That was a rough year, before I got to Texas, and one that is often recalled as painful by the surviving participants.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

Amazing growth there in the FTC/VEX teams. I believe more and more schools realize that FTC/VEX are more within reason than FRC for lots of schools.

Reasons that I see are
- less financial investment
- less tools required
- fewer technical resources required
- space required is much less
- contests are more locally accessible (less finances required to travel)
- less intimidating for a rookie/inexperienced teacher to begin a program

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

There has to be some other important factor here besides the JCP grants though. A whole bunch of MN teams were founded off of those grants back in 2010/2011 as well, but almost none of them have folded.

Here are the relevant documents I could dig up:
2010 (I think) JCP sponsored teams
2011 JCP sponsored teams

According to the second document, JCP sponsored 21 Rookie/2nd Year Teams in MN, and 28 in TX.
As of the 2014 competition season:
only 2/21 of these MN teams are inactive (3747 and 3524)
14/28 of these TX teams are inactive (3819, 3758, 3409, 3713, 3778, 3730, 3392, 3804, 3857, 3696, 3369, 3529, 3762, and 3869)

Perhaps it is not a useful analysis to compare MN to TX, since both regions seem to be outliers in terms of growth/sustainability (on opposite sides of the spectrum). I'm just curious as to why MN seems to be doing so well in this area, especially since there were no sustaining teams here prior to 2006.

Maybe since MN didn't have very many other robotics programs in 2010-2011, the teams here didn't really have the option to "drop down" to a less resource-intensive competition and thus were forced to stick through the sponsorship crunch? That seems silly, but I can't come up with a better explanation.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

Andy,

What is the geographic distribution of the lost teams? Larger cities? West Texas? I ask only because I don't recall losing 2/3 of teams around the Austin area.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

The biggest losses are definitely more rural or small city schools. I can put exact numbers on these with a little data crunching if people are interested.

Texas Regions that struggle.
1. South Texas
2. El Paso
3. West Texas
4. Small towns scattered across the state.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

It is not about TEA approval it is about district approval. The robotics classes have been on the books for four years under CTE. Districts are just now picking them up. Whether that is due to having qualified teachers on staff or because STEM is the current buzz word in education today is something each district has to answer separately.

CTE (Career and Technical Education) is under a standards review. All of our TEKs are being reviewed and rewritten. Yes, you/we, will be getting more STEM/robotics classes. The battle is getting the core subject areas and districts to recognize the value of STEM courses taught under CTE along with those taught under the math and science departments.

Thank you HB5 (House Bill 5) :) one of several things I really like about it but it only applies to current freshmen, students on the 4x4graduation plan (current sophomores - seniors) don't get that 'STEM' endorsement opportunity...or any of the others for that matter.

Fact not fiction or rumor. It was approved by the Texas legislature and TEA in January. Here is the catch...that qualification expires in 2016. No one knows what's going to happen after that. Also, I am not sure what the teacher certification requirements are in order for it to count. I can find out and let you know but I think the awarding of the FL credit for CompSci is largely up to the district not dictated by TEA.

The CTE Computer Programming course re-writers toyed with asking for their course to count as a foreign language credit, however; the concern became what certification/re-certification TEA would require of the instructors to be considered qualified to offer the foreign language credit.

Hope this helps some and if you are teaching AP CompSci (or your district is) you need to look into the Foreign language thing now before it expires so that when that comes up for review you can hopefully keep it.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

3747 actually ended up combining with 3018 last year and now 3018 has switched over to FTC (at least last I heard).

We have a large corporate community in Minnesota that is absolutely awesome in keeping these teams running with the support of the RPC.

Re: Texas Registration 2015
 

I have no problem at all with Minnesota taking over the Texas thread ! Texas has a lot to learn from the Minnesota model.

I don't see a lot of details about how new teams are funded in Minnesota. What is the typical funding process for a rookie Minnesota team (i.e. 2 years of funding , connecting sponsors to teams) ?

What is the name of the Minnesota non-profit that raises funds from the corporate community ?