Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

For all of you who were at BAE GSR, you heard Dean's rather radical proposition for homework this year.

For those of you who didn't, Dean declined to specify the homework until Representative Bass spoke. He had said, however, that he wanted to see every high school in the country offer FIRST. Bass said, somewhat off the cuff, that he'd try to make New Hampshire be the first state to do that.

Dean, in response, asked each and every FIRST member to write a letter to each and every Congress member in their state and tell them about their positive experience and urge them to come to a competition. Obviously it's too late for this first week, but maybe it could happen for next year. Anyway, the important thing is that Dean also asked that he be personally CC'd on each one of these emails.

I'm starting to send mine out for New Hampshire.

For you NH FIRSTers, Judd Gregg can be emailed via a form here. John Sununu has a similar form here.

Charlie Bass makes it easy and gives an email address:
cbass@mail.house.gov

Does anyone know the actual addresses to Gregg and Sununu? It would be nice to email them and know that even if it gets filtered it's getting filtered by someone by hand and doesn't simply drop into a black hole.

And what about Dean? Best email I can find for him is contactdeka@dekaresearch.com, but that's specified on the website as something that doesn't go to him...can anyone else help out here with info?I want to send my emails tonight...let's start clogging inboxes! Politicians do have to listen to us...

--Petey

p.s. Can Brandon or someone sticky this (or their own explanation) on the front page? I figure it's Dean's homework...it's important....

p.p.s. Sent off the first message! Boy, will they soon be receiving a flood...

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

It's a great idea, our team already does.

Check it out here: http://adambots.gotdns.com/cgi-bin/v...liticalLetters

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Have any other teams started his homework yet?

--Petey

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

In January the Heroes Of Tomorrow (HOT) and Frog Force (Team 503) were invited to attend the Detroit International Auto Show. Dean was there as was Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. Dean made the same challenge to her--get FIRST in all Michigan high schools.
I think that Governor Granholm has accepted the challenge. She has met several times with FIRST people to discuss how to get FIRST in the rural schools. She will be attending the Great Lakes Regional this Friday to see firsthand how the competition works. She will meet with four teams to talk to them about how FIRST works for them. There will also be a FLL demo for her to see.
Dean has made these comments for several years, but he now seems to be shifting into high gear.
Our team works closely with State Senator Nancy Cassis. She has been a judge at the Official Michigan FLL Tournament for six years. She has invited our team to address the Senate Education Subcommittee and has allowed us, and Frog Force, to address the entire State Senate.

Keep working on the elected officials. They are looking for ways to encourage science and technology in the schools...and FIRST is a great answer. Write those letters. Set up meetings to go talk to them. Invite them to FIRST events. This is a great way to help FIRST grow.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

New Jersey's 12th Congressional District (which includes Trenton, home to the NJ Regional) is represented by Rush Holt, former Assisstant Director at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Holt, who lives in Hopewell Township (also home to team 293) spends a lot of time in the district and in fact just today attended a local town hall meeting. Holt is also a member of the House Education and Workforce Committee and he convened the first "Einstein's Alley" conference with the goal of strengthening central NJ as a hotbed of science, technology and innovation in the 21st century. He would no doubt be more than willing to speak at a FIRST regional.

As I have mentioned earlier on these forums, it behooves winners of regional championships and chairmans awards to write their legislators (state or federal). Your legislator might congratulate your team on the floor of the state legislature or even the US House.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

This would be huge for spreading the FIRST Fever across the country. Furthermore, since it is now just FIRST and no longer US FIRST, maybe the time should be taken out to increase international teams. I know in the NJ Regional, the Vice Consolate of Brazil was there to watch one of the Brazilian teams be chosen for an alliance and end up becoming finalists. If we could just encourage members of the international community to come out and just watch for a day... see what happens and the excitement of a competition... I think it would really help. This would especially be true if they came out to Nationals, where you cannot not cheer or have some feeling of excitement while watching the competition.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

This is a great thing; I just need to buckle down and write. But petey if you havn't mailed that yet, your wiki link is wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST


But the letter does look good. A very good model.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Crap.

Oh, well. As we've seen on /., plenty of politicians are familiar with Wiki and will probably know how to find it if they want to.

Thanks, sir...although I am a little disappointed Dean hasn't released some sort of blast about it that would actually inspire all students to do such a thing. Oh well. I bet all his time is taken up selecting his differentiated wardrobe...;)

--Petey

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

I think its almost impossible for every school in the country to have a FIRST team when even registration is $6k. There seems to be a major problem with this all... we are loosing companies that are potential FIRST Team sponsors- yet - FIRST is trying to gobble up as many High Schools as possible... the system is growing to fast, and will suffer the consequences at some point.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Agreed. The problem is not mentors, as Dean said. The problem is money.

FIRST needs to make it less expensive or convince the government or some giant corporation to subsidize programs.

But that won't happen as long as similarly expensive football, etc programs don't receive such funding beyond the local level.

--Petey

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

I just sent mine - to those looking to contact your Sentors, here is a site that I found useful.
http://www.senate.com/stindex.html
It's a directory page - click on your state abbreviation and you will be given direct links to your senator's email adresses and websites. There is also an option to find the congressmen for your district but the site only allows you to contact your personal representative; not the whole state.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

I think this is a good idea. When President Bush spoke during the State of the Union about supporting programs that motivate young people into technology fields (yes I'm paraphrasing), I thought FIRST would be the perfect match. After my rookie year, I felt every school in the country should know what FIRST is and be involved at least in some way.

Sadly, my high school never had a FIRST team and may never get one. I learned about it in college and now am very glad I did. Every person here should be glad they have a Robotics team and can at least get involved at some level. Perhaps it is from my own experiences, but Dean's homework always touches me and have fallen for all the propaganda.

Yes, I could give up on FIRST. Yes, I could take the easy way out and join Chuck pernamently. However, these kids in Owego diserve a team of their own. Lockheed Martin Owego should not only know about it but be actively involved. Its what keeps me motivated, its what keeps me going.

So go out their and get new teams onboard! Go out their and get new sponsors! Talk to your congressmen and be part of the democratic process. Its ok to be active, its ok to be a lobbiest espeically if it is for the betterment of society!

/steps off his soapbox.
Sorry for the Rant. I just fell it should be said.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

I think a piece of important information is missing here.

We get government officials to attend events. Then what?

What exactly do we want state and federal government to DO to support FIRST?

We should have the best answer to this question. If we leave it up to them then who knows what their respose will be ?

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

How much does you fooball team cost your school????? Yet they find money for that.

shaun

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Yes, they do find money for the sports teams and not for much else. That will not change. As long as we need to continue to beg from taxpayers and corporations for funding we continue to prove Dean wrong.
We don't have a shortage of mentors. We have a huge shortage of available funds.
We continue to see teams win regional events and not be able to afford to attend the championship. That is a lack of funds, not a lack of mentors.
FIRST is too expensive for the startup organization to sustain without a lot of outside money to help them along.

Just my 2 cents worth

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

I think you have to be more positive. I think that there should be more of a push for Schools to treat FIRST teams like varsity sports. A good way to gain some ground with schools is to try and start a robotics class so that the program is integrated into the curriculum.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

yeah here in texas they find the money for football by cutting art/music/AP classes.

but I must agree with the above poster that the problem is not mentorship its sponsership . . pearce(1745) has been trying to form a team for the past 5 years, and it was only this year that some how we scavanged 6k before the deadline(see. miracle)

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

You should have your letter handwritten and mailed off for like (whats the price of stamps again, they always seem to go up) $.37USD or $.39USD (w/e it is), that way, it is ALWAYS filtered by hand. and it has a better chance of getting on your congressman's desk. also, you can send a seprete copy to FIRST Place, or Dean's Personal Resedence. with a recipt from Kinko's or the UPS store for like $.10USD.

Im gona do my letter for my team before the Florida Regional, so we can hand it to the Governer himself when he is there on friday.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

The problem I see it is more of communication and publicity then necciarly funds. Yes, the Robotics program is extremely expensive however unlike a football team the money should not be coming from the educational system ie taxpayers but rather through corporations. The idea at least in my mind is to get local industries in technology to support the community through financial investment into a robotics program. Really your comparing apples to oranges.

However, how are we going to obtain the goal of one robotics team to every high school in America and then the world?

People need to know it exist.
The public needs to know the good its doing.
Corporations need to see its worth the investment.

One way to achive this is to talk to our politicians. Constantly they talk about supporting programs that keep kids off the streets, teach them strong moral values and educating them for high tech fields. FIRST does all three, a proven model that works.

Imagine what would happen if Govenour Pataki, Senator Clinton or even President Bush came out and said I support FIRST. This would serve to raise public awarness of the program which in of itself would spearhead new teams.

Close to know one in the Owego area knows about FIRST. I have had three meetings with upper management at Lockheed not just because I'm trying to get their approval but also to educate them as to what it is. They are not even aware of the 30+ Lockheed supported teams.

Really what we need to do is get the word out there. Writing a letter to your Congress Person is exactly that.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Actually, our football plan is completely privately funded.

I should know. I played for it, and helped sell the Varsity Gold Cards that paid for it.

That said, football is an institution. Football is a sport that everyone knows and most everyone cares about to some degree. FIRST does not have that cachet. I go to William and Mary, a few hours away from Dave Lavery and VCU, and I've yet to meet anyone who's even heard of FIRST.

Dean is right when he says that football will not provide as many jobs for people as FIRST will. But he also misses the point--people don't do football because they want to be NFL players necessarily, but because it's fun as hell. But Dean hates sports. This is the man who said that walking was "an unfortunate remnant of the dark ages" while promoting the Segway.

Look at "Friday Night Lights" for a good example of a football program that is over the top.

Football has been a school institution for over 100 years--we can't expect FIRST to show the same potential in a 10th of that.

Also, don't forget that football generates revenue through ticket sales, merch sales, and (in big programs), television sales. Does FIRST do that? Not unless you do a postseason regional...

Great suggestion. I may well do that.

--Petey

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

been thinking about this over dinner. Resist the urge to run to the government as if you were petitioning the king to solve your problems. If your government representitives dont know what FIRST is all about, then we are better off keeping their hands off until they do.

Lets look at this backwards. Next year we magically have a FIRST team at every HS in your state, or to make it easier to grasp, in your city.

Whats that going to be like?

Will FIRST be able to supply playfields and scoring systems and judges and head refs to every regional in the county, when every HS has a team?

Could IFI possibly have that many control systems built in a year?

Where will the regionals be held? a HS gym? at local collages? Universities? regional events at HS and state playoffs at Universities?

If every HS has a team, and the goal of FIRST is for students to work with engineers and scientists, then where are these 3 or 4 engineers per HS going to come from? What about cities that dont have any local engineering companys to supply mentors? An average size city/ suburbs/ surrounding rural area might have 30 HighSchools. That means you need about 120 engineers/ scientists / technology professionals each year, in each metropolitan area.

I think these are the major issues. Now what can the government do to address these things?

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Some thoughts:

Government contracts. The US government spends billions of dollars a year for defense contracts, research, NASA and JPL. What if the government required that, in order to win engineering contracts a company must support the FIRST program by supplying a certain percentage of mentors to FIRST-like programs. Same for universities that get government grants?

Centers and resources: If FIRST standarized on a playfield that could be used every year then we could have FIRST-centers in most cities. A place where HS teams could go to work on their designs, a centralized machine shop, practice field, computer equipment... This would be much easier than having every HS in the area put together its own robotics workshop and practice field every year. A FIRST-center in each city could also employ full time machinsts and mentors, maybe people who have retired from industry and want to do something important with some of their free time?

Transportation: getting students to the local worksite, getting teams to the local events, and even transporting the local champions to the state regionals and championship - these expenses could be funded by the school district, like they do for sports teams.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Ken--

First off, I'm not sure that your first thing is accurate. If we suddenly had a giant thing next year with all the high schools involved, you'd have a problem with infrastructure, but not if the infrastructure had been built up over years.

Although, you have to assume that if there are divisions in high school sports, there would be divisions of FIRST (D1A, D1AA, etc, maybe based on engineers involved or team budget).

Now that I think about it...I'm not entirely sure a FIRST team at every school would be the best thing for the organization as a whole. You can't be a homegrown organization with strong personal and personnel ties AND be ubiquitous.

Gov't Contracts: I like that idea, but you're talking about mandating private business to do extra service for the gov't and I'm not sure I like that.

Centers: True that. You only have to look at the discrepency between our machine shop (a classroom with a few tables and saws) and the Nashua South machine shop (blast furnaces, multiple CMD machines, in a room the size of our gym) to see that for true standardization of FIRST we need to standardize the means of production. But will Dean, as an entrepreneur and businessman, support this? I doubt it. Besides, FIRST thrives in part because only 30 people (or whatever absurdly low number Dean said at BAE) work for it full time. Everyone else is a volunteer. Imagine how much money it would cost if teams also had to subsidize machine shops, machinists, and mentors!

Transportation: That won't happen until FIRST has the cachet of sports teams, which won't happen until politicians listen and national media publicize us. Schools like mine don't even have the money for extra classrooms, much less funding sports teams for championships. In fact, I don't think we do subsidize those trips--I think our sports teams might even have to pay. As I said earlier, our football team is entirely privately funded. Our sports teams travel by school bus and thus if the school funds anything it funds diesel fuel.

--Petey

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

Ok, I had an awsome thought at FLR and wanted to walk you guys through it. Who here knows about American Forces in Europe, Department of Defense Schooling (AFE DoDS)?

I'm a military brat. Grew up in the Air Force my first 15 years with some of that time spent in Germany during middle school. Living on the base, it was litterally an American getto. Every one around you is military, speaks english and your teachers are all Americans. There is not a whole lot to do most of the time, and the base commanders support nearly anything to keep the kids busy and active in a good environment. The military loves the Scouting movement, with nearly every base having a troop now. Our building, bus even the gear were completely free, second hand mostly but very fine stuff. They also love technology. I had video editing, computer literacy, and music composition classes while only in 7th grade. Which comes to the third part, money. A budget for a AFE DoDS is insainely huge, easily four times that of your typical district and they get alot of cool toys. With a graduating class of 50, we likely had the budget of one with 300 with some of the best teachers in the world.

So, my idea: lets see some AFE DoDS FIRST teams! From past experience, I think the higher ups would go for it whole heartedly. In my mind, FIRST is the best of the Boy Scouts combine with a technology aproach. It would also be a good opertunity to get a strong "foot hold" in Europe. So what I propose to do is write a letter addressed to the Base Commander and Principal for Bitburg American High School. Its been nearly 10 years, so I doubt anyone I know is still there. At this point I'd have to do some serious digging just to find an address. But hey, why the heck not?! Some time this week I'll draft a letter and post it here, see what fokes think before sending it off.

Re: Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda
 

That sounds like a great idea.

Did you ever manage to send off that letter?

--Petey

p.s. If any of you didn't get the latest email blast, the correct email to CC FIRST on these things is homework@usfirst.org