This last year was a struggle for me to get a team started at my high school and get the funding for it to take part in the FIRST competition. In the end we couldn"t find a company that was willing to give us anywhere near what we needed (early September: "$5,000? Sure, but the guy who has the company checkbook left early today to do some tax stuff, we"ll get back to you." Week before registration money is due: "What? Oh, we might be able to get you $200...") so the team at our rival highschool (Team 832) decided not to go to the Championships and instead paid for our Regional registration (no lack of Gracious Professionalism on their team). We also had a couple of my adult friends who volunteered to pitch in registration if necesary, so I feel we don"t have any corruption to worry about yet.
We had one engineer who is actually just an electrical engineer and prgrammer, but with our combined leadership and experience, we managed to put together something that looked like a robot and a core of guys who each have enough drive now to go start a team. Our enigineer also has enough common sense to pull back and tell us how to do things, rather than just doing it and expecting us to learn from it (he also gave the mentor badge to me at competition because I knew better than to push one of my core guys out of the driver or human player spots and he said that there was "a better view from the stands" or something...) I believe we have a fun, bright future because all of my guys want to go out and start LegoLeague Teams and help with Championships next year (because the GWCC is only an hour drive away bwahahahahaaaa) and everyone involved is so happy about what we"ve managed to do and no one has mentioned anything about scores at the regional, just how much fun we had while we were at the competition.
Plans for next year:
1.Get money to fund ourselves and all of the little LegoLeague Teams and the
Community Tech Center we plan to turn our old school into when we move into the new facility.
2.Get an idea how to build something that looks like a robot and
works like a robot at the same time.
3.Recruit more students and parents to have fun with us (and learn how to build and program robots.)