The government should be sponsoring FIRST. To some extent, it does already, but if FIRST is really going to become commonplace nation-wide we need government funding. The federal government, could, in my opionion, make no better investment then sponsoring FIRST teams in every highschool in the country, for reasons that all of you are aware of.
That being said, a cool alternative would be FIRST teams designing a building arcade machines, undercutting the commercial operators...
