My first reaction to the title was a replay of Edna Mode's "Is this a question?!" in my head. I decided not to post until I dissect the major reasons why my answer is a solid yes.
The mission statement is about inspiration. If you accept that FIRST and its robotics programs inspire in the U.S., what possible argument would change it elsewhere? The only issue is one of geographic scope.
FIRST and its competition has a number of core values, but the first and foremost is Gracious Professionalism. If teams are expected to help each other, what sort of example would it be for "USFIRST" to not offer a helping hand across international boundaries?
Another understated, but no less real core value is that of evangelism - spreading the program. Back when we were still getting feedback on our Chairman's submissions, one of the biggest dinks was that we had not (up to that point) started or mentored any other FRC teams. Same argument.
The final issue is whether this should be one program, or if each nation/continent/global region should be a separate program. While I have not done the math myself, robotics competitions seem to have an economy of scale - that is, the larger the program, the less it costs per team and per participant. This means that it is more efficient to have one international program than a number of smaller ones. Let's break down a few reasons:
- Game design is expensive. Doing this once a year is much more efficient than doing it in each nation each year. And don't forget the Q&A, and the training materials with go with each new game. (Though it would be nice to say "Hey, let's build a robot to play Australia's 2017 game this summer.")
- With suitable planning, field elements and game pieces scale up. The first few years of FRC, game pieces were straight COTS items; as time has progressed, the scale has enabled FIRST to specify the game piece (e.g. "floppies", triangular and square tubes, and custom-colored and -imprinted versions of standard items at a not-too-unreasonable price.
- And not really part of the separate/divided question, but another case of economy of scale: The denser teams are packed, the less it costs for a team to compete. The cost of putting everyone on a bus and in a hotel is more expensive than the allowed balance at the bottom of a robot cost accounting worksheet. This means that the goal should be to have regionals and districts everywhere - the sponsor support required to fly a dozen teams across the world would appear to be enough to run a local regional and three times as many teams averaging twice as many students each.