[ebarker]

There are 8 winning groups from around the country. We like to treat them all equally, but the reality is some are a little more equal than others. If you watch the video you can get a feel for how it lays out. 3 of the 8 are featured. The 1st girl on the video is on our team and you see her several times throughout the video with teammates.

Only 3 students from each team plus 1 mentor/teacher is allowed. That makes 24 + 8 = 32. Of the 8 mentors 1 and only 1 is selected to be the NSTA SeaWorld Busch Gardens EEA educator of the year. That is an individual $ 5,000 prize. The women on the video won and that is why she is being filmed.

So when we went to the water park there were the 32 students and adults, plus a handful more, plus maybe 50 park employees taking care of us. The whole park all to ourselves. The whole park !! At Busch Gardens the next day we had to share the park with the public but attendance was light. It was after spring break and before summer.

I absolutely cannot encourage you enough to do something like this.

It will expand support for your FRC program because it helps the public understand the value of FIRST. It will improve your team's income because your fundraising model becomes more 'mission driven'. It helps the environment. And it drives recruitment. Students join our team faster than we can graduate them or run them off. Not only do students get excited about robotics but they feel like they are working on something important that goes beyond themselves and beyond the team.

The money doesn't hurt either. We will use the $ 10,000 to expand and operate our outreach programs beyond our normal team budget. The students and mentors have been working on a long term strategic plan so that when these windfalls occur we can capitalize on it and make a lasting impact. Next year you will start seeing the impact of this planning and uptick in funding. For now we will keep you in suspense ..... OK, Actually 1/2 the money is going into long term communications projects.

edit: Anyone reading CD knows that I say 'strategic' a lot. Strategic planning is what got us here. Driving down to the dome I gave our students a printout with the awards earned by all the Championship Chairman's teams going back 10 or so years. I told them to scour the data for patterns. Without exception the answers was - "most, but not all, most CA teams won the KPCB, then the EI, then the CA". As Sherlock Holmes would say, "it's elementary my dear Watson". You need a good strategic business plan with mission focus to drive your teams results.

Ed