Yeah, I was in quite shock that the politician who just lately became the President of Israel, remembered the project and decided to promote the project.
Just for general knowledge for you guys, FIRST in Israel started when a group of teachers (or some guys related to) the Israeli Technion in Haifa, which is all about technology and Engineering, went to a FIRST competition somewhere and the U.S.A and decided to bring the project to Israel.
The first Israeli FIRST season started in 2005, the location of the stadium of the competition somewhere in Haifa, with only 12 teams across the country.
By 2006, there were 24 teams, and as of 2007 there are 34 teams.
Althought this grwoing rate might seem small to you guys from other countries, but Israel is a small country with a very little populace (with over 1.3 million children going to school) with very little amount of schools.
Somehow the project reached the desk of the Israeli Department of Education as is still promoted by it since then. This promotion allows schools which bring this project into their schools, allow their students to complete "Bagrut" (Matriculation) exams in the subjects of Science, Technology or Engineering.
Currently our regional competition is in the Nokia Hall Stadium in Tel-Aviv, where the famous Israeli basketball team, Maccabi Tel-Aviv, hosts their games. Plus, this year we had a not so tiny media coverage about the comptetion (yet it didn't reach the levels of the main news channels[Oh, we'll get them to notice us
]) and the visit of a known and powerful politician in the competition raised the level of the project, in the terms of more support into it and more actions that might be made to recognize this project.
I haven't read or learned about the other robotics related projects in Israel (which aren't a little number of them. Our school brought in like 4 robotics projects, including FIRST), but I firmly believe that FIRST is the largest of it's kind in the country, although not a lot of people know about it.
Another robotics project team in Israel won a world wide championship competition and had a small but noticable mentioning in some of the newspapers.
I believe that if one of our Israeli teams could win the Championships (or even better, receive the Chairman's Chamionship Award!) we'll receive much more recognition, and I believe we need this recognition.
Of course, that doesn't mean you have to go easy on us in the championship, 'cause it's just going to be a boring competition if you do.
