pic: Districts in Minnesota Flyer

[ehochstein]

Originally Posted by DareDad

Could you expand on that statement? I've seen no indication of FRC in Minnesota "growing for the sake of growth", rather it's been quite organic.

What Eric said is exactly correct, at least in my opinion.

I work with multiple MN teams via email and over the phone throughout the season to provide remote support. Too often, teams were created with money but no outside mentor support. Essentially, when you talk to a principal/district official and say you have $5,000+ to start a FRC team in their school and it is an amazing experience for students, who is going to say no? All they need to do is find a teacher to officially be coach and the administrator/district official can be the alternate contact. You then have a teacher coaching a team who potentially has no engineering background. I can speak from experience that this happens, I've worked with multiple teachers who have had close to zero computer experience. I have no issue being tech support for teams and I love to help but what we've done is almost a disservice to these students. My favorite example is a 3rd year team that had 5 students and 1 mentor. I worked with the mentor for two weeks over the phone and email to get labview up and running and their electronics connected correctly. I know how amazing this program can be; it inspired me, but in this case we were not inspiring these students. We threw $5,000 at a team ($1,000/student) that struggled to get even the basics done and that makes me incredibly sad inside.

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

Minnesota grew so fast that the support for all those teams to truly be successful couldn't possibly be there.

If you think throwing $ at teams and then watching them routinely flounder to pass inspection or even field a robot that moves is beneficial to the kids on their team or the kids on other teams your wrong.

Quality sustainable growth is what benefits all. Quantity growth is not.