[Bomberofdoom]

As far as I know, the idea of FIRST in Israel first came up when a couple of guys from the Technion of Israel in Haifa went to one of the Championship events of FIRST in Atlanta, and they noticed the FRC and the whole concpet of raising more people searching for careers in engineering, and said "Why don't we do this over here, in Israel?". So they contacted FIRST and got some couple of volunteers from the US to come and help try to bring the project to Israel. The details of the project where brought in front of the Ministry of Education of Israel and they accepted the project as a high school project in technology for schools in Israel.

First year there were around 16 teams, the regional competition was in a confrence building, if I'm not mistaken, near the Technion and the following year, because of the expansion of the project across the country, the regional competition was transfered to the Nokia Hall Stadium in Tel Aviv, which is a sports stadium for the israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv.

I'm quite sure there's lots of mistakes in what i said and I hope someone will correct me. I might try to contact the Technion guys who started the project. Would be nice to write an article about how FIRST started in Israel.