WE'VE DONE IT!
 

Congratulations FIRST!!

We have reached the team number 4000!!!
Can you believe it!??

To Celebrate, I am wondering which teams have come from your FRC team or yourself? Describe your journey to making a new team and some challenges that you had to over come. And any other information you would like to share.

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Ya, just saw 2 4000 teams sign up for Lake Superior today

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Congratulations, FIRST!!
It's incredible how rapidly the program grows. To be honest, its no wonder all events are BagNTag this year.
How many teams are there now??

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*Like*

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I'd rather see the numbers 1-1000 filled completely with their originally numbered teams...

Maybe I'm just being a wet blanket but I just want to remind people that we should not be looking for rapid growth. Instead we should be looking for sustainable growth.

Sorry for being negative.

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I am happy to see us go over 4000 but I have to agree. I find it very sad to think of a school or other group that had the oppurtunities FIRST offers and then looses it.

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4000 Is quite an accomplishment, But I say keep going because its still not in every high school yet!

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Not every school can afford to have a team. It is sad that some have not been sustained. It is great to see veteran teams and learn from their experiences. Lee's Summit has been lucky to have teams in all 3 of our schools. If and when we get a 4th, I can only hope we can help it to achieve a FIRST FRC team and keep it. The only problem I forsee is sponsorship for multiple teams in one community.

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Furthermore, even if every team could afford a team there simply isn't the infrastructure in place to handle it. The following is from a thought experiment I did a few years back assuming every school district in the state of Michigan had a team. Some minor things have changed (there were ~170 teams in MI last year, season changed to 7 weeks, and a few other minor things) but I think the overall conclusion is still the same.

I think it is great that we have as many teams as we do, I think that every student should have access to FRC. But we really need to realize that this isn't a simple problem to solve and there is no silver bullet.

Edit: For anyone who wants to run the numbers for each SCHOOL... there are 687 high schools in the state of Michigan. It really doesn't help the numbers at all...

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I think the secret to strong support for multiple teams would be to funnel all sponsorship fundraising through an umbrella organization that would then give grants to the teams themselves.

-Daniel

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Understandable just a goal though.

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Agreed. Passing 4000 isn't nearly as impressive when one considers how many empty numbers there are.

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Not even close.

Using Ontario as a (perhaps unfair) example: [since Ontario has 3 FRC regionals, while the remainder of Canada prior to the 2012 season had none; Ontario has a disproportionately high percentage of the Canadian teams.]

Ontario has 911 publicly funded secondary schools (read Public+Catholic school boards combined), as of the 2009-2010 school year.

Ontario had 65 FRC teams in the 2011 season. 7 or so of these teams are at private schools that are not part of the 911 above. That means that only 6.3% of students in Ontario are even EXPOSED to the program, let alone get to participate.

Keep in mind: The highest numbered 2011 rookie was 3883. Rookies for 2012 started at 3925.

As of 2011 of the 3883 teams that have ever received a number, only 2065 of them played in 2011. That means that in 20 seasons, we've lost 48.6% of the teams that have played.

Also, only teams that existed since 1997 have a permanent number. Teams that folded prior to 1997 have been lost to history in a way we can't track, due to re-issuing numbers each year prior to that.

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I remember as a kid thinking how high a team number like 834 was. Lol

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Agreed. Teams in Indiana are collaborating to create an umbrella organization, IndianaFIRST, that will (among other things) generate funding sources, media relations, community support, interteam communications, and general knowledge. We're hoping to make a system that works that other states, regions, and areas can emulate and improve.


To go back to the OP, here's our FRC "family tree":
Our mentor team was 234.
We mentored 3176 (2010 BMR RAS)
3176 mentored 3487 (2011 BMR RAS)

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What's also interesting is the growth rate based on some known checkpoints.

1992: <30 teams (28 IIRC)
1997: <200 teams (192)
2003: <800 teams (highest rookie was 1238, 787 attended events)
2006: <1200 teams (1978 highest rookie, 1133 attended events)
2009: <1700 teams (3122 highest rookie, 1677 attended events)
2011: <2100 teams (3883 highest rookie, 2065 attended events)

Seems to me like somewhere between 2003 and 2006 we had a huge leap in teams dumping the program, going from around 30% to around 45%

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This list of all FRC teams ever might help your analysis
http://www.team358.org/files/frc_rec...Teams_Ever.xls

It'll tell you how many numbers were never assigned at all. There are 663 non-team holes.
Also, be aware that a number of teams have possessed multiple team numbers, so those defunct team numbers do not represent lost teams.
The pre-number teams are included in that list above along with later reincarnations, so they are counted too.

We're at 45% school district FRC participation on Long Island and we've lost about 11% of past district FRC teams, although some still come & go.
That also doesn't mean the school districts lost to FRC aren't doing FLL or FTC/Vex or some other STEM robotics program still.

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I still have team 38's robot at home from 2000 with the IFI control system, where the Operator Interface has only 3 digits to display the team number, channel, and battery voltage. I remember when rookies were in the 500s, and team numbers over 1000 were just a far off dream.

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Co-Signed.

I'd be much happier to see 10 sub-1000 numbered teams return than see 100 4000+ numbered teams join.

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We have some of those laying around somewhere too! Such great memories. :D

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I think it's a bit harder to figure out exposure to the program because school sizes vary drastically. Just something to think about.

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Wow :ahh: ! I just downloaded the spreadsheet and took a look. It's quite an amazing feat for you guys to organize all of that information. When did you guys start working on this?

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Of course they do; however, there are also teams like 1305 (NNSRI) that are actually a conglomeration of schools in rural areas. Its not perfect math, I was merely giving an example of how we're nowhere close to 100% market penetration. Andrew posted an interesting counter-argument above, in that the logistics of operating the program the way its run now with that many schools involved are completely ludicrous.

Using Ontario as an example, if there were 911 teams in Ontario:

Of the 65 Ontario teams last year, 37 attended 1 regional, 23 attended 2 regionals, and 5 attended 3 regionals, for a total 98 event slots occupied by the 65 teams, and and average 1.507 event slots per team. Assuming this holds roughly true during growth:

911 Teams would need 1373 event slots, an average of 40 slots per event means we'd need 35 events. 35 events in a 6 week span, means an average of a little less than 6 events per week. Ontario would need 7 fields on its own. 7 fields and 35 venues.

Each event requires a number of volunteers. Lets conservatively put that number at 40. 40 volunteers times 6 concurrent events per week means 240 volunteers MINIMUM, and that's only valid if the same people volunteer every week. If every volunteer were unique at every event, we'd need 40x35= 1400 volunteers.

Those 35 events would send 35x6 = 210 teams to CMP. (This discounts repeat winners, which we all know happens, but even the minimum possible, assuming the same teams won each week would be 36, still ~10% of CMP's capacity, just for Ontario)

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Throw up a picture?! I miss those OI's, they took 3 seconds to boot and connect, not 45-90.

-Dave

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Continuing this discussion: There are 24,348 public high schools in the United States. I put together a quick spreadsheet to compute these numbers. I attached it here. It also includes the number of schools in every state in the United States.

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I remember when the 1500's were rookies and I thought that FIRST would never get bigger than that.

Can't wait to see what happens when we hit team 9999.

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In the beginning this sort of fell out of other records we started keeping in 2005. Then it became a community effort in this 2009 thread.

P.S. Nice data to play with Andrew.

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The T5K problem?

Although FLL seemed to handle it.

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Due to the IP address allocations, the current control system scheme will fail at either 10,000, or 25,500, depending on the assumptions that were made in the software.

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Well, not exactly a 3-digit display model, but if you're feeling nostalgic:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/img...9a8e07c6_l.jpg

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So how many other people are looking forward to when the total number of teams reaches OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Of course! Still take only 3 seconds to boot, and still work great. Even the old Victor 883's, with diodes, still work perfectly!

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The Greater Kansas City area just created our own umbrella organization called KCSTEM and is through UMKC. So far it has been great, although I may be biased due to being on the FLL planning committee.

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I'm not so much trying to say that FRC can't scale to being in every high school, so much as I'm saying that FRC as we know it (with kickoff, KoP, 6 week build, 6 week competition season + a 400 team CMP) can't scale to that level. Theres simply not enough money, manpower, and space for it to make sense. Something would have to give. Breaking it into regions, as has happened with FiM and MAR is a step in the right direction of improving cost-effective scalability, but even that model is still a long way from being able to support a team at every school.

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I agree, but remember - FIRST is not FRC.

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Fixed. Semantics as far as I'm concerned, but whatever.