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Unread 29-11-2012, 13:33
xitaqua xitaqua is offline
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Re: Engineering and Robotics program in danger

Kelliv,

Thank you for your inquiry, every learning community is different, so the way they fund the assets might be different, some of them do not belong to a school district and might be home schoolers or in another country such as Brazil. All the projects allows everyone to participate, even for teams funded by single gender organizations such as Girls Scouts, I still have male students participating but on a support role. So we try to integrate all levels, so for FLL, we have H.S students as mentors.

Sharing resources depends on the community, and we recommend follow a stakeholder model where we divide the total annual cost by 12 and anyone contributing 1/12 of the budget get's to keep the robot for one month of each year, so for a $12,000 program, if an organization donates $1,000 then that organization owns it for a month, most likelly the organization will let the team keep it, in exchange for demos at their site for the month allocated to them.

We encourage teams not to seek large grants, and look for sponsorship around $500 to $1,000 or no more than 25%. Usually once a team has already started, we use new sponsors to sponsor "demo robots" that will not compete....such as $300 to buy parts to build a right arm for a robot that was built out of cardboard.

Lego Mindstorms you can buy at a toy store for around $300, have a summer camp for 7 students at $50 each, you usually recover over one session. Some teams get the money for LEGO Mindstorm from professional organizations or borrow from other teams in exchange of the summer session fee.

Cheers,
MC

Quote:
Originally Posted by KelliV View Post
I think I'm missing something here. So I have a few
questions.

1) Is this a school district where all grades (K-12) are in the same district and share resources?
if so...
1.5a) Do you share resources between age levels? So is the FTC kit with the HS kids one year and Middle School the next?

if not...
1.5b) Is sharing resources between districts possible and how do you go about it?

2) How do you keep sponsorship when teams turnover?

3) How is this better than combining the 12 communities to create a few solid FTC, FLL, and FRC Programs under a 501c3 or something?

4) How many years does it take you to recoup the initial purchase of all LEGO kits for the teams and upkeep as LEGO Mindstorms changes?