[xitaqua]

Siri,

Great point, I agree there are two group of students to be considered :
1) Pre-Disposed
2) Under Represented.

In group 1 usually the community is well resourced and just need some guidance. An example would be a parent that is an engineer in a suburb that has a girl that that would like to compete but there are no teams in the school. In this case we work to find the closest program and give them contact information and help mentor the team for the first year, modeling to the parent what are the behaviors of a mentor. Usually by second year we just visit on kickoff and a week before competition.

In group 2 there are no well defined resources, like in an urban area in a food desert, in this case we work with the community leaders to identify the resources and needs, we develop a plan and "challenges" for the community to meet. An example is that we had 6 elementary schools that wanted to do robotics, so we gave them a challenge to draw a "gardening robot". They also sold produce from their gardens. They raised by their own $700 by selling produce, cookies and game tickets. We matched with sponsors for a total of $2,000 in assets they currently have, but each school have $300 in assets in the form of a LEGO Mind storm as a minimum. We are still working with them and we are looking to work with them for another 11 years. This is year 2.

We switch our focus but it is dependent on the team if they want to "switch in competition", what we have found is that a group of them continue while other start the new competitions.

I seen some teams that do both BEST and FRC, where it is required for Freshmen to participate on BEST if they want to do FRC.

The largest budget recommendation is FRC at $10,000, FTC at $1,200 and FLL at $600. BEST we budget at $100.

On the demo robot path : $300 LEGO Mindstorm, $500 Quadcopter, $1,000 VEX, $5000 underwater and $10,000 unmmaned vehicle.

Cheers,
Mark