[DonRotolo]

Greg,
Congratulations on learning your preferences with engineering before it's too late.

I can't answer your questions directly, but I can offer my 2 cents:

Demographic: Mentors and educators. Students just don't read magazines, but educators do. Part of the focus would be to show existing team adults how to improve their programs - bringing FIRST into the curriculum, the changes in a district, convincing the Board & administrators, resources (both educational and for the robot parts), and so on. Brainstorm this. Many of the continuing articles would be team stories. Educators love to write about what they are doing in schools, because they like to share what they have learned, and it's a feather in the cap of the teacher. (A mild version of publish or perish)

Images: There should be plenty of images at 300 DPI or above widely available. Remember to respect copyright, even for a school assignment, credit photographers, and get written permission....just like a real magazine.

Sections: Resources for educational things and for robot parts & materials (e.g., who really has the lowest price for sheet aluminum in the USA??), a team's 'how we did it' story as described above, a calendar of events (great for the off season), an interview with a coach, mentor or exceptional team member (maybe the Woody Flowers winner?), college and scholarship info, an educational article (robot tech - how things really work) which will bring the students, teachers and mentor to a common level of understanding (e.g., let the metal shop teacher get a clue about programming), certainly a letters to the editor column, an editorial, maybe 'highlights of Chief Delphi", and an 'expanding' or 'stretch' column, where teams read about how to stretch their limits a bit, and 'fundraiser of the month' which spotlights an innovative fundraising activity. That should get you started...

Advertising: Yes, a magazine doesn't support itself with subscription fees, and a magazine as specialized as this is less likely to see a large subscription base. Advertising will support a free publication, though. Advertisers would include FIRST sponsors, suppliers of interest to teams, college recruiting departments, some foundations wanting to offer support, surely the car companies.... For your project, solicit some of the biggies (like McMaster, Motorola, Terminal Supply, Radio Shack, etc) for ad copy - free to them - to make the magazine more realistic. Look in Nuts & Volts and SERVO for other potential advertisers. Gee, even SERVO & N&V should be considered...

As far as broad appeal goes, you'll have to stretch it a bit. With a market of maybe 5,000 (1000 teams x 4 per team, max, plus 25% 'pre-rookies') and more likely 2,500, FIRST today really is a niche of a niche. But, there are magazines that succeed at this, albeit most are done on a shoestring. Broader appeal would have to come from the parents and public at large, kind of like Popular Science (popular robotics?).

Good luck

Don