[AlexFrancisBurc]

As far as being in college to learn about engineering, To my personal experience, my friends at Illinois Tech Robotics(ITR) (Illinois Institute of Technology) state that they learn more from the projects we do, hands on, at ITR than they do in their classes. As a significant portion of the Committee bringing forward this proposal for a pilot is students, and alumni of IIT, all related to the Illinois Tech Robotics group, it is with this experience that we push towards creating a game for college students, to continue hands-on education, that is unparalleled in any classroom (that we are aware of). We seek to continue to create excitement for engineering, and also to help promote the other levels through the awards structure (With our events point system, we place a considerably higher value on the non-robot awards)

A little about ITR:
We have a heavy focus on mentoring and working with FIRST programs. We were in fact founded with this purpose(in 2005), building our own robots came a couple years after founding.
Our recently retired (a week ago) president and head of the College Level FIRST pilot group, Chris Jones is also the Illinois FIRST Senior Mentor(with Karina Powell), and has mentored a few teams during his time at IIT/ITR (he is presently a Grad Student). We have multiple members (including myself) on the Midwest Regional Planning Committee. Our faculty adviser is the FTC Affiliate Partner for Illinois, so we help run the Chicago FTC Kickoff, scrimmages, and the Illinois Championship.
One of the roles of our outgoing V.P. Philanthropy is to run the Chicago/Illinois FRC Kickoff (presently me).
Among our members are a few team mentors, and we run workshops for local area teams often.

Last year the club accumulated just under 5000 community service hours (nearly all with FIRST)

In addition to that we have 4 major robot projects ongoing. With 1 complete for the year.
Jerry Saunders Creative Design Competition (which we won last year with one of our three robots, Roslund)
A Quadcopter for the College-Pilot
A swarm of roombas that will be networked and autonomously search for something as a collective group.
An exoskeletal leg project to increase agility
The complete project is IIT's Pumpkin launch, which ITR placed first in.

The organization also performs it's own fund-raising, with many in-kind donations, in addition to supplemental funds from the university managed student activities fund.

I throw all this out there just to give perspective on what we (the College-FIRST planning committee) know is possible with an organized and motivated group of students.