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Originally Posted by Coach Norm
It is very interesting that Minnesota has such a large number of FLL teams and they have seen an increase in the number of FRC teams. Laying the groundwork at younger ages drives success and creates interest not only at the student level but at the elementary level as well... Parent support of a program is instrumental in assisting the mentors and teachers of the program.
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Parental support is vital for the health of any youth program. We see stark differences between swim teams that have strong parental support and those that don't. I suspect that a lot of the mentors supporting the FRC teams in Minnesota may have got their start as coaches or mentors for their children's FLL teams. That is where I got started as did a number of the other FRC mentors here in Houston.
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Originally Posted by itsjustmrb
My personal opinion is the declination of teams is based more on the mentor ratio, available resources and culture of the school district/town.
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The coach of one of the most successful FLL teams in Houston was bemoaning the fact that he had trouble helping to set up new FLL teams because the school district he is in is more interested in football than STEM. Before we moved out of that area, my sons were on two teams there. The first collapsed when the teacher/sponsor retired and could not be replaced. The other had difficulty in getting support from the school district, the school principal and the teachers. They also had trouble finding students who were interested. Several other teams have come and gone in that school district.
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Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV
The fact that FRC is hard is part of the point. It wouldn't be the same competition if it were easy to run a team but that does come with a cost.
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It probably becomes prohibitively difficult if the majority of the people involved in running a team (teachers, school administration, mentors, students and parents) have had no prior experience with smaller scale robotics competitions such as FLL, FTC or VEX. One could use the analogy of competing in FRC is like running in a full marathon. One typically works up to it by starting with 5k runs, etc. Of the three teams FRC my sons have been on that are/were struggling, none of the other people involved had any prior experience with any other robotics competitions. Unfortunately, not knowing what they don't know, they did not make good use of resources made available by more experienced teams such as Spectrum and the mentors did not ask to be mentored themselves. The team my son is with now has a strong presence in VEX and VEX iQ. They get much better results in terms of tournament results and, most importantly, the amount of learning that students experience.