Keep FIRST in Michigan (FiM) from killing FIRST Lego League

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by gblake

Hmmm,

That page offers links to use if you want to start a team, or if you want to offer corporate support, or if you want to write a snail-mail letter. I don't think I want to do any of those.

Gail Alpert (the first contact listed on that page) is the president of FiM and would likely be the best person to contact if you were interested in emailing them directly. She is usually pretty good about returning emails fairly quickly too.

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Why is FRC considered more important to have than FTC? What if a high school wants a FIRST team, but space is an issue (which is often the case)? They are likely able to support an FTC team but not an FRC team.

I think the issue is that if you have overlapping programs it becomes harder to sell the more expensive, more time consuming one to new schools. In most areas it would just make sense to just go with the easier option, but FiM has facilitated solutions to these problems through getting state grants to cover funding, and various workshops to help rookie teams throughout the state (amongst other things) that these things aren't really problems as much as they are excuses.

As a result of excluding FTC from High school level to promote FRC, FiM chose to assign FTC to middle school ages and bump FLL down to elementary to prevent overlap from the two programs (which would have limited access to FTC as most schools would not have two programs, and in most cases would likely choose FLL if given the choice).