I talked to Mrs. Talmage (one of our team leaders) yesterday, and there actually is a rule that would stop us. Apparently (this is coming from her), FIRST has a rule that each team MUST be sponsered or in some way affiliated with a high school, and if a group of people arrive who are not on an "official field trip sponsored by their team's school" then they are not allowed to open the crate. This happened in 2001 at VCU, when the (I believe) Norfolk team went to the competition in vans. Well, there was some law in VA that said if students rode in a 15+ passenger van, it had to have a roll bar, but their vans did not have such a device. So the team's school would not recognize it as an official trip once they found out, because they feared getting sued. Anyway, because of that, they weren't allowed to open their crate. My team (I wasn't on it that year) offered to share our bus with the Norfolk team to go to and from the competition, and then to travel back home too, and this convinced Norfolk's school to sponsor the trip, and thus the team could open their crate on Friday. Anyway, the point is, from what I understand from my team leader, if you go up without your school's approval, you can watch and have fun, but you can't touch your robot. And according to her, that is a FIRST rule.

Stephen

PS. She was very adamant with the fact that each team must be sponsored by or affiliated with a high school. I saw several posts here on Chief Delphi which stated there are some teams who were not affiliated with high schools. Does anyone have a definitive answer to this question?

If you feel unsafe, then I don't think it really matters.

About the high school thing, that seems strange, but I guess we'd have to go by that, oh well, I'll still be there at least to watch, if they won't let us opent he crate.

There's no requirement that a team be affiliated with a high school. There is a requirement that high school students be on the team. I know specifically that team 365 really isn't affiliated with any high schools (someone from that team correct me if I'm wrong but I always got the impression it was just a bunch of high school students from different schools from around the area that worked on the robot). I've never heard of the rule nor the problem caused by a school not recognizing a team.

Matt

You are absolutely correct. We are not affiliated with any high school. We meet at one of our sponsers' (DuPont) facilities, and our team includes 15 highschools and a couple homeschoolers.

sparky
 

Hey 384.. I read your posts in the other thread about all trips being cancelled or postponed for now, that really sucks!!!! I hope you guys get to go.. I dont even know if our team is going to be allowed to go, we havent heard anything either way on the matter yet, so we're just hoping for the best right now.. So, I guess it's fingers crossed for all of us, we're really hoping to see you guys at nationals! i cant think of anything we could do to help, but if there is anything you guys can think of that might help even the slightest, be sure to let us know! and to all the other teams who are facing the possibility of not bein able to go to houston, we'll keep our fingers crossed for everyone.. I dont even know when to expect a decision from our school on the matter :(

They won't

Oh you never know, we might be able to go.... ;)

That really sucks you guys, and I feel really sorry for you. Our district has been rather quiet on everything, they aren't cancelling any trips, out of the country or inside the country. Actually, I just got back from a trip to Chicago (unfortunately we didn't get to visit FIRST :( ) I just figure that as long as the district doesn't say anything, we aren't saying anything to them. Granted, the district really doesn't know we exist, and I have never seen an administrator even look at our robot (except for an assembly when we got to pick up a ball with last year's bot).

Anyway, I hope you can find a way to make it, even if it means going on your own. And remember, if your parents call you in for "personal reasons" the district has to honor that as excused. At least, our does...

Ah war...
 

Well as this so called war(aka finishing off daddies business) is going on we all think of the worst but in reality there is nothing to fear but the thought of fear itself.

Although the tought of terrorists attacks scare me, i' m not really worried. i think if there would be an attack on the US, it would be on a FIRST competiton. I mean FIRST is extremely cool, and a big thing to us, but for those "non-robotics folks", FIRST is like a big geel convention. So i'm not so worried, because i think that we'll be fine, and we'll have a great time, just like at regionals. We acutally got to regionals on wednesday night, when we first attacked IRAQ, and we still competeted, and got into our own world.

*Plus we can mow down terrorists with our robots!!! (j/k)

If teams do have problems with the war, which i hope does not happen, i hope it happens b4 the final teams list comes out. b/c if a team takes a spot then is not allowed to go it would be unfair to the teams that did not get the spot. but i really do hope that all teams that qualify are allowed to go.

war isn't the only thing we hafta worry about now...
the number of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is almost doubling every day. the current count is at 70 deaths and over 2000 cases reported world wide.