(dual posting with apologies, to make the point about not calling FIRST unless necessary)
Congratulations to all the teams that have been selected to receive NASA Challenge Grants and NASA Program Growth Grants. Your participation in the grant application and selection process - by all teams, regardless of selection status - is gratefully appreciated. The generally high quality of the applications received shows your enthusiasm and excitement for the FIRST program and the positive results that your teams bring to your schools and communities. You make us proud to be a part of the process.
For all the teams that have been selected to receive a grant award, I want to draw your attention to one particular note. As stated on the grant announcement page (
http://robotics.arc.nasa.gov/events/...ponsorship.php ), "NASA will cover shipping expenses for the 2009 FRC control system to be shipped to all NASA-sponsored teams prior to the season kick-off. FIRST has been requested to send the FRC control system to each grant award team, at NASA expense, unless you specifically inform NASA and FIRST that you do NOT want to receive it." FIRST has already received many phone calls this morning asking what teams have to do to receive the control system. If you DO want do receive the control system early, you don't need to do anything - we will take care of it for you. Please
do not call FIRST unless you do NOT want to receive the control system.
For the applications that were not selected, you may want to review the post Travis Hoffman referenced in another thread at
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=45. Although written for last year's process, virtually all of the comments are still true and valid. We cannot provide a public response for why any one particular application was or was not selected. But that post summarizes many of the issues that were encountered during the evaluation process that prevented us from selected many of the applications. In particular, the discussion concerning the submission of the Chairman's Award and entrance/exit survey data should be reviewed. Not completing all of the obligations agreed to when a team received a grant in 2008 was the most frequent issue we encountered during the 2009 grant evaluation process.
-dave
.