San Antonio FRC expereince
FRC came into town with 457 in 2000
499 and 653 come in a year after that in 2001
Zero growth until a break through year with NASA funded, Texas High School Project funds in 2009
The following year new teams formed from Boeing grants in 2010
During that those two years 457 had gone dormant due to the lead teacher and founder retiring from teaching. The transition plan failed as the potential lead also transferred out of the district. So in 10 years of just a few teams in our area and just recent years of high growth, no team in SA has folded due to lack of funding.
News Flash 457 is coming back this year after being gone for 2.
Key to some of the success and growth/revival has been teacher training during the summer and teachers from successful veteran teams moving to new schools/districts and forming a team of their own. The later definately being in the organic growth mode.
The program that I now direct, Texas Institute for Educational Robotics,
TIER. Has conducted 90 contact hour STEM teacher institutes focused on educational robotics. We teach them software, have them build kit robots (VEX & Tetrix) ideas for lesson using robotics in the classroom, how to write a team business plan, grant writing tips, the importance of an elevador speach.... The point being that community developed programs can do a lot more to sustain teams than far away funding programs. New money has been very helpful in starting new teams.
As Jane and others who have posted recently, FIRST in Texas is about to fund 40 new FRC teams (190 FTC teams) in the State and San Antonio is about to double our FRC teams in a single year with 6 or so new rookies.
Workshops/mentoring/veteran team support/ great ideas from white papers on CD and this and other threads are going to be part of the mountain of work that sustains this spike in growth and hopefully also spurs more moderate growth in future year.
