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Originally Posted by Greg Needel
For the first years of FIRST the main focus was on US teams. Making this a way for kids in the US to get exposure to math science and technology. Hence the usfirst.org It has only been in the last few years that there has been a push for FIRST outside the us. Although even with that i believe that the focus of the comp will always be United states based, mainly because of the level of emphasis on America's declining role in the engineering world view and all of the us based companies that support FIRST and that cause. This doesn't go to say that the program won't grow more then it currently is outside the US but I doubt it will ever be the main focus to spread internationally.
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Originally Posted by Gabe
Where is Russia, India, China, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand? Why aren't they part of FIRST robotics?
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As has been mentioned, FIRST has only recently been spreading to other countries, with its main emphasis on getting a majority, if not all, of high schools in the US equipped with a FIRST robotics team. As Rohith stated, while starting teams in other countries is awesome, it can end up being very costly, and not every team is able to financially do so. Thus the best alternative to starting a team in another country is to start teams at high schools in your surrounding area.
Could you even imagine the number of teams that would be created if a majority of high schools in Russia, India, China, Japan, and Australia had FIRST teams? That's more than 1/4 of the world's population!
With that many teams, the Championship even would definitely need to be longer than 3 days. But then again, you can never have too much of FIRST.
