Quote:
Originally Posted by Sperkowsky
Why would a team spend 20k to watch
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Already answered:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunshine
If the experience outside of the game field is so enriching (and I believe it is) some groups could come for other things than the competition of their bot.
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These enrichments include the exposure to the top teams, with opportunity to "pick their brains" as to how to improve both our team and the students' individual engineering capabilities. And oh, yeah, there's that inspiration thing that Dean and Woodie go on about ;->.
That said, attending a championship without having pay the entry fee to compete
is a significant savings for those in the conterminous US (33% in our case, paying for 25 students and about eight coaches/mentors to take a bus from Southeast Louisiana). Getting the school and school board to approve that much field trip time to "attend" would be a far greater challenge than raising the money. If we were "attending", we would probably try to send about a dozen students and three mentors, and bus-pool with three other teams.
For the record, I'm not voting. I'd love to take the team every year. I'd also love to see some "superregionals" each of which send about a dozen teams to the "real" championships, and have 25-50% of the teams get to a super. One big problem with this model is that the championship gets smaller. The really big thing about the super that bothers me is teams (many from outside North America, but quite a few within) that qualify for championships but can't afford the travel. Supers would make this situation even worse.
The bottom line is that I'm thrilled to be going this year, and taking two of my three children (even though the other one founded the team), and about two dozen other teens that I've come to know as extended family. We've roughly doubled our budget, and have raised nearly as much money in the past four weeks as we did in the previous eleven months to make this work. I'd be thrilled to do this every year. I also understand that getting about 4000 FRC teams in one place jus' ain't happ'nin'.