What First is missing.

[Marc P.]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Which means there are about 100 students a year no longer exposed to STEM. If there were a viable competitor to FRC it may provide an opportunity that currently doesn't exist for those students.

Sounds a lot like what VEX and FTC are intended for. Some areas don't have the financial means/mentors/build spaces available to support a program on the scale of FRC in every school. Grants are often available to get teams started, but they don't provide the means for these teams to be self sustaining once the grant money runs out. I saw this happen in Boston with the Smith Foundation grants- we had something like 23 rookie teams in one year. The next year, all but a handful did not return.

FRC is and always will be expensive, and not just financially. The tools, space, mentor and student hours (not just during build season, but planning meetings, organizing fundraisers, public outreach and demonstrations, recruiting, etc), parts, other materials, and competitions all have fairly high costs associated with them, and not all are monetary. Any competitor on the scale and of similar mission to FRC is very likely to have similar requirements in terms of time and material.

VEX and FTC appear to be designed to avoid such requirements. With primarily bolt-together components easily assembled with hand tools, much more relaxed time requirements, reduced system complexity, and dramatically lower cost, these programs were started with the intention of getting STEM into schools where FRC scale teams are either impractical, or unfeasible. These "100 students per year no longer exposed to STEM" don't need something on the scale of FRC to be inspired if their school/community can't support it, and a competitor of equal flashiness and cost likely won't change that. Practical alternatives do exist, if the powers that be are willing to consider them.