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Re: New legislation?
I would be very carefull about requiring mandatory anything. FIRST has always been a 100% volunteer organization. The teachers, the mentors and the students are involved because they want to be.
You pass a law so that teachers, mentor and/or students are required to participate and FIRST will go down the tubes.
What we could do:
From my experience starting new teams, its fairly easy to find funding for a local regional attendance, and to have several students and one or two mentors on a team, but the hard things are:
Finding space: team space, build space, shop space, machine tool space, playing field space, store-the-robot-till-next-year space....
I think it would be awesome if cities could have FIRST centers. A facility where several school teams could meet, sharing the machine shop, the playing field, and other common assets, while having smaller separate areas/rooms for each team. This could be a year-round technology center, with other projects and programs - maybe even a place for teams to show off their robots during the year to new students, and potential new schools.
Something like this would be hard for any one company in the area to sponsor and fund, but the state could easily step in and own it.
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