[dlavery]

The list of teams selected to receive NASA "Challenge Grants" to fund their participation at one of the NASA-sponsored regional competitions will be relesaed in the next few days. We are cleaning up the final evaluations and ensuring that the selections are consistent with the grant requirements and priorities. Please bear with us, we are running through the evaluations as quickly as we can.

Once the selections are announced, we will issue a single, lump-sum allocation directly to FIRST on behalf of the teams that are selected. FIRST will then credit the amount of the registration fees to each team that has been selected, for the Regional Competition to which you applied. You will not receive any funds directly from NASA (it didn't make sense to handle all the overhead to set up 100+ individual procurements to the teams, and then make them turn around and send the amount to FIRST - along with all the additional delay and risk of lost mail, misdirected funds, account transfers, etc. - instead we just send the funds to FIRST for you). If you have registered for a regional competition, we recommend that you do not send a payment for that regional competition to FIRST until the results of the "Challenge Grant" selections are announced. If your team is selected, you will not need to send a registration payment to FIRST and can use your funds for other things. If you are not selected to receive a grant, there will still be enough time after the announcement to send your own payment to FIRST before the December 3 deadline.

Note that these comments have to do only with the "Challnge Grants" that are being issued to first and second year teams that have applied to attend one of the NASA-sponsored regional competitions. If you are a NASA-sponsored team that is directly supported by a NASA field center, then you will be receiving funding directly from that center as in prior years.

-dave