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Unread 11-01-2013, 01:26
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Re: Registration 2013

I don't think I made this apparent in my post, but I am in favor of the District system. I want more matches. I want to attend multiple events. I want to see more teams in FIRST because the barrier to entry is lower. What I wanted to bring up though is that many of the benefits of going to a District system aren't there for rural teams or when clusters of teams are very far apart from each other. The District system may be new in name only if few of the teams in these areas can afford the travel costs to go to the 2nd event that they now have free entry into and it doesn't produce any closer events for them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GaryVoshol View Post
Remember that the district system comes with new district events. Perhaps your team could sponsor a district event, so your first event would have distance 0. That happened in MI - the first year we started districts, there was one in Traverse City. There were only 2 teams in town, and another handful within a 1-2 hour drive. Yet it served as a catalyst for growth. In a smaller town, a FRC event is a big media event, and it was well publicized. There are several teams now in NW Lower MI that were started since we went to districts.

...

Why doesn't Iowa have a dozen or more teams?
This was the only thing I could think of that FIRST could do right away to make Districts have a noticeable benefit in some of the more rural areas. I wasn't aware that they did that with success when FiM started, they may not need another strategy if that works as well in other regions.

The low quantity of teams in the Mountain West and Northern Plains is largely an issue of population and density. Iowa as a state has 3 million people and they're spread out over a fairly large region; a list of high school sizes I pulled up shows only 18 high schools with more than 1500 students and 42 high schools with more than 1000 students. If you had a FIRST team in every one of them it wouldn't be a problem but given the typical rate of FIRST teams relative to total high schools in a state the numbers just work out to a low total. The lower population density also means there are less businesses in any given area to be potential sponsors, and less potential mentors, etc.

Two things working in Iowa's favor:
1. Iowa launched a STEM initiative this year that more or less covers the cost of competition for FLL and FTC teams. There has been an explosion of growth in both of these programs in a few years, and I would suspect it could spill over into more FRC teams in the future.
2. Iowa has a really strong manufacturing base, so I feel that the percentage of the population that are engineers or some sort of skilled trade is higher than in some other states (just a personal observation).

Quote:
Originally Posted by PayneTrain View Post
I feel like regions should be competing against each other to have the best representation possible at CMP. When MAR and MSC teams are playing twice as many matches as my team for the same price, I would like to do something to level that ASAP.
Who doesn't want twice as much competition time? I'm all in for it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemo View Post
In my estimation, the district system doesn't have a major impact on driving distance from Iowa. We'd probably be going to Kansas City, St. Louis, etc, which are the same places we're going anyway.

I would be pretty happy to get into a district system because of the lower cost per event. I'd be sad to lose some of the current flexibility to travel in any direction to a regional event, but in the end we might retain that if everything goes district.
For the current teams we have the District system would be nice as long as a few of the nearby events were options (this year all of the nearby events filled up before second regional registration opened). If students split up pretty evenly between the two events the travel costs would probably be about the same. I don't think the District system will start many new teams here unless a closer event ends up forming though.
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