You can have a two-person team, however, it's recommended that the team be 4-10 student-aged members with at least one adult-aged mentor. having 4-10 youth on the team will allow for more brainstorming, a shared workload, will alllow teamwork opportunities to flourish, etc. An adult mentor is needed to take responsibility for the team while traveling and at events, and to pay the bills, may be able to offer suggestions for building the robot or team organization, etc.
Your team does not have to be affiliated with a school or organization, however, when it comes to fundraising and procuring sponsors you may have better luck if you can show an affiliation with an established entity.
A mentor is often a teacher, an engineer or someone acting in another professional capacity (ie computer programmer), someone's parent, a college student. They should be interested in working with teens, able to devote time to work with you on this project, able to take time off from work if necessary in order to travel to competition(s) with you. The team needs to make it clear what the role and responsibilities of its members are - who will be making team decisions, who will be managing the budget, who will be designing the robot and building it. These are critical areas to define early in the season. They may change from year to year. There is a forum in CD for Team Organization which you may wish to look at.
When we refer to sponsors, it is usually a company which contributes financially to the team's budget, or contributes with "in-kind" donations (material to build a field or printing t-shirts or brochures) or provides support by allowing employees (perhaps engineers) to work with the team. You can approach local companies or ask parents if their employers offer volunteer grants, etc. You can find some white papers that might be of interest to you in the Resources section of the NEMO (Non-Engineering Mentor Organization) website, including
Creating a Killer Team Packet to use when making a presentation to a potential corporate sponsor.
In addition to having corporate sponsors, many teams will also do fundraisers to earn additional funds to offset expenses. These can range from holding pasta dinners to car washes to standing outside grocery stores asking for donations. Chief Delphi has a section devoted to fundraising ideas so you might find something there of help.
The
FAQ section of the FIRST Vex Challenge website gives some estimated expenses for a team as well as answering other questions you may have. Last year's
competition manual is still available in case you'd like to see what the game looked like but will be replaced with this year's challenge on September 13.