Quote:
Originally posted by sanddrag
I forget when it is supposed to happen by but eventually there will be a FIRST team in every high school.
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Well, that assumes growth is linear for all time which it most definitely is not (if it were, we'd at somepoint have more teams than high school students).
I don't think that the FIRST Foundation itself will be the limiting factor as to how large FIRST can grow. Honestly, there isn't a huge impact on FIRST by supporting one more team or even a hundred more. Yes they will need more staff but so far FIRST has managed to scale greatly without adding too many employees. And with more teams there will be more registration fees to help pay for more employees.
My main thought has been that it will be on the local level that it becomes difficult for teams to develop. There simply aren't as many sponsors out there as we would like. And after awhile we'll run out of all the possible sponsors. Now, I know Dr. Joe likes to bring up the example of Beatty and that there are lots of Beatty Machine like companies out there but, simply, not all of them are interested in sponsoring a robotics team. And FIRST is an expensive competition. At some point it's going to become very difficult for teams to be able to raise money and then team growth will slow.
Matt