[archiver]

Posted by Kevin Sevcik at 04/26/2001 5:45 PM EST


College Student on team #57, Leopards, from BT Washington and the High School for Engineering Professions and Exxon, Kellog Brown & Root, Powell Electrical.


In Reply to: FIRST is missing out
Posted by Joe on 04/26/2001 1:25 AM EST:



Alright, about half of this will probably be restating other peoples posts, but I like to hear myself talk. On with the show...

First and foremost, I think FIRST does a LOT more to reach kids and get them interested in science and engineering. With Battle Bots or Robotica, you might be reaching a huge audience, but it's for 30min-1hour each week with commercials. Plus, it's TV. Do you really think there are that many kids watching it who actually WILL go out, get money and materials, and build a bot? I'm doubting this. With FIRST, we're reaching an audience of about 10,000-15,000 (yes I'm bad at estimating). But, this much smaller group of kids is getting 6-10 weeks of 15+ hours of hands on, in your face inspiration and experience. And frankly, FIRST is always going to be bigger than BattleBots. A small BattleBots team isn't likely to garner corporate sponsorship. Especially a beginning one. So there just plain won't be as many people who can get into the competition.

My main point here, though, is that FIRST doesn't NEED national media coverage. We've gotten this far without it, haven't we? We don't need the media to get schools interested in this, and we don't need it to get corporation interested either. I think the fundamental problem here is that some of us are lazy. The way I see it, FIRST is supposed to be one very large pyramid scheme. One team recruits two teams. Those two teams recruit two more. And so on until we've got a team in every school we can reach. The problem here is that that requires work. We and FIRST can't just sit around and wait for the sponsors and teams to roll in. We've got to go out and get them. We don't need coverage to get teams and sponsors. It'd be nice, but it's not necessary. All we need to do is go out and start recruiting. I guarantee you that if you tell a corporation how big FIRST is and what it does, they'll be happy to sponsor a team. If you don't believe me, I'll direct you to my mom, and she can tell you about getting companies to sponsor regionals and getting sponsors for all the new teams that popped up in Houston.

Anyways sorry about the huge post. I always seem to get carried away...