**FIRST EMAIL**/5-minute survey for FIRST strategic plan

[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

FIRST is currently engaged in a 5-year strategic planning process. As part of this process, we are looking for input from you on a few questions regarding the experience of your FRC team(s) and the FTC program. The information you provide will be a critical input into the strategic plan. We would greatly appreciate you taking 5-minutes to complete the following survey. We ask that you complete the survey by next Tuesday (Sept. 27).

Two important things to note when completing this survey:

• We are looking for only one (1) response per team, so please coordinate with the other mentors on your team to make sure only one of you completes the survey
• If you work with more than one (1) FRC team, we ask that you complete the survey once for each team you mentor so we can have information on as many teams as possible

To complete the survey, please click on the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JQYBBK6

Thanks in advance for your assistance. We appreciate your input into this process.

Go Teams!

[Chris is me]

Done!

[Colin P]

Anyone else care to voice there opinion on the survey?

I think FTC stands in the shadow of FRC. FTC has a lot of advantages, though. It's more financially sustainable, easier to build and service, and easier to ship. If you look at it economically, FTC is probably better. However, FRC does a far better job of attracting attention to STEM, which is, after all, the intent of FIRST. As easy as it can be to have an FTC team, most kids are probably going to be drawn to the big robots.
These are just my rough opinions, anybody else think otherwise?

[Tristan Lall]

They should probably have explicitly distinguished (the older) Vex-based FTC/FVC from (the recent) Tetrix-based FTC.

Embarrassing though it might be, asking the same questions about VRC would probably make for a valuable baseline against which to measure FTC's recent performance. Such an exercise could be useful to FIRST, because they might be able to discover metrics by which FTC is outperforming VRC at present (and focus their marketing efforts around those).

[Bob Steele]

The impression I got from this survey is that FIRST sees FTC as a way to get more students into FRC.

I think FTC needs to be nurtured as a stand-alone program and not a program that "leads" to FRC.

FTC is quite abit more sustainable than FRC and represents a program that could be in every high school.

I am confused about what FIRST wants to do with it...
Here in the Northwest I see a number of FRC teams doing both...
That's fine... but I am just not sure what FTC is supposed to be doing.

The more FTC teams can celebrate their own victories and practices, the better off for everyone.

I am opposed to FTC being a feeder system for FRC....that makes it second class... it deserves to be more than that.