pic: Districts in Minnesota Flyer

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by ehochstein

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.

Wiscosin just passed a bill that will throw money at teams and I'm fearful that Wiscosin will have this same problem. Especially because the RPC in Wiscosin has the flawed* view that we need more teams before we switch to districts.

*North Carolina and Indiana has proved this thought false.