Chief Delphi - FIRST in DEU

Dear FIRST Robotics Community,

This past year, FRC 3824 established a robotics-themed school-to-school exchange with a high school in Göttingen, Germany. The German group joined us for 3 weeks during March/April and we’ve just returned from a June visit to their school. This was a rewarding experience for students, teachers, families and communities on both continents. Our students were excellent ambassadors, modeling the mission of FIRST and widening the appeal of robotics in the school and community. The students, staff, and administration at the German school were impressed by FIRST. We’re thrilled that our partner school is joining FTC next year in Germany! We will be right there, too, with regular meetings on social media.

If you are a school-based FRC or FTC team with a German language program, I encourage you to see if your school already has an established GAPP (German American Partnership Program) Exchange. If so, then you already have a partner school, and have an excellent opportunity to make a connection and help spread FIRST to a larger community.

If your school has a German language program but no GAPP Exchange, you can start one!
Details here: https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/spr/eng/gap/aus.html. Even if your school doesn’t offer German, you can still start an exchange using the link above. I can help you with this, too.

If your team has/had an exchange student, you already have a connection to a potential partner school. Please consider reaching out. It’s a very rewarding experience.

Finally, for those teams that have sponsors with a German connection, you have an excellent resource to assist in finding a partner school!

There are over 500 FLL teams in Germany. Last year there were 16 FTC teams. Growing FTC is the best way to build capacity for FRC in Europe. FTC is well supported in Germany, so let’s see if we can work together to grow the number of teams participating!

https://www.facebook.com/ftceurope/?fref=ts

Sincerely,

John Tilson
FRC 3824
john.tilson@knoxschools.org