Quote:
Originally Posted by Citrus Dad
We were throwing around an idea about how to companies might get more engaged in FRC. We thought that FIRST could invite a half dozen sponsoring companies such as Boeing, Lockheed, Northrup, GM, Ford and Chrysler to each meet the game challenge, build a robot in 6 weeks and then compete in a special match on Einstein. It might generate a buzz about the competition and more actively engage the companies in FIRST.
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This is what FRC is. At the very least, it's my understanding that this is how it all started.
If you go back and watch footage from early years, you'll notice they don't call teams by their name, or their number, but by their sponsor. Many teams had a single corporate sponsor paired with a high school, so you would literally see GM versus Motorola in the finals. FRC enticed corporations and engineers by presenting a cool challenge with publicity and name recognition for the winner - plus working with high schoolers who can be inspired by how cool everything is and for most teams take a hands-on role in a real engineering challenge.
Somewhere along the line, FIRST's desire for growth led to the creation of more teams that start at the high school level and find sponsors, rather than starting at the sponsor level and finding high schools. The educational aspects of the competition saw more emphasis, COTS lowered the barrier to entry in terms of engineering resources, and FIRST actively aimed put itself in every high school in the US.
Again, I wasn't there (I was *born* in the first year of FRC), but this is how it's been described to me. I feel like an understanding of FRC's roots helps explain the corporate-school partnership a bit better and can put to rest fears or complaints about "sponsor built robots" - indeed, that was the point at one time.