Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveGPage
Akash,
I agree totally with the issues you raised. I am reaching out to some of my contacts over there, Educomp Datamatics, InfoSys, and and Wipro. I see several major issues, many identified already here on this thread: 1. Funding, 2. Lack of desire to be apart of a non-Indian initiative, 3. Student Time constraints, and lastly 4. Getting Mentors. When I attempted this earlier, the mentors that I was talking to, asked me, "How much do we get paid?" I found this to be a common issue.
As to my comment about "Public" schools, I meant that in the definition of what a "Public" school is in India, vs "Government" schools - which is more like what we call public schools. The public schools I worked with, in India, were privately funded and sponsored, and had at least some money, but certainly - even in those cases - were constantly dealing with budget issues.
I do understand about the time contraints that Indian students have. If they aren't in school, they are in an after school tutoring program, or they are working. I would recommend a robotics curriculum, that could be part of the school day, backed by some kind of technology grant/initiative. I think that FTC might be the better initial approach within the schools, then FRC.
We can reach kids, no matter what part of the world they live in, no matter what conditions they live in. I believe that this FIRST community can make it happen!
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Well I go to the American Embassy School here in New Delhi and the teachers here are pretty enthusiastic about creating this team (especially our robotics teacher). I've also reached out to the British School in New Delhi and am trying to get some public school kids as well but the problem is language. The kids here do speak English but the English is much different then what we speak. It combines aspects of Hindi, the local language here, and English. If we are to start a team the kids would all have to know one language and that would probably have to be American English.
As for the mentors, with my father being an IIT Alumni, he can get us resources from inside that college. He might even be able to get us the IIT campus as a workshop for our bot. If this doesn't work I also have an uncle who is Vice Chancellor in a new upcoming university in Delhi, Sharda U. But the problem with that is that they are not a completely developed school yet and it would be harder to get resources there.
I think FRC is still an option as long as we can get some more resources.