[laurenlacy]

What's the story behind Minneapolis? FIRST has been pretty weak up in Minnesota in the past, so who's leading the charge to bring more teams to the area?

^sorry I messed up the whole quoting thinger...

I know that we(team 1816) have been spending countless hours trying to increase the FIRST presence in MN, directly influencing the formation of 5 teams and indirectly influencing another 9. We came home last year from competitions really excited to spread the program into MN, and made that one of our primary goals.

We missed a lot of school(haha) to go travel and promote FIRST Robotics in local high schools, and have established an excellent reputation within our own community, which is getting noticed by local and state media.

We also worked with Susan Lawrence to promote FIRST in MN by setting up a FIRST booth at a science and technology conference at the MN Science Museum, which was attended by 1000s of HS students.

Another major contributing factor to the growth in MN is a partnership we established with Medtronic, which led to Medtronic partnering with Boston Scientific to help sponsor many of the new MN teams. When we approached Medtronic to ask them to sponsor us they thought the program was so cool that they told us it was our job to start new teams.

We also had a presentation for Medtronic employees explaining how inspiring the FIRST program is, and asking them to mentor new teams, which helped secure mentors for new teams. This made it significantly easier for the teams, because they had funds available and mentors... so thank you very much BS and Medtronic!

One of our mentors, Mark Lawrence, has also been working tirelessly to establish contacts in high schools and help them start programs, and then Ken Rosen, MN Regional Director, has also been working very hard to generate interest in the program by traveling to high schools.

I also know that many of our mentee teams are excited to help start their own teams, so be prepared for the MN FIRST presence to get large very quickly.

Haha... a very long winded explanation for a very short sentence... but basically the growth in MN is due to the focused efforts of many, many people interested in seeing FIRST expand beyond LEGO League in MN.