a new team

[KenWittlief]

Ive been involved with starting new FIRST teams. Essentially you need:

an engineering or science based company to sponsor you (I suppose a university could meet this requirement)

engineers from the sponsoring company - its easy to start thinking that FIRST is a robot building contest, and forget that you need engineers/scientist to be a part of the team - otherwise instead of inspiring students to be engineers, the team will fail on several levels, and you will only frustrated them and led them to conclude that engineering sucks!

you need money - at least $10,000 for a small team that travels to only one regional.

you need a place for the team to meet, with some machine shop equipement (drill press, band saw, lathe...) - remember the purpose of the team is to show students that engineering is cool stuff - if you dont have access to any tools/equipment/machines, then trying to build a usable bot is going to be frustrating and counterproductive

you need a high school to participate in the program. The principle must be on board and you MUST have at least one teacher to be the FULL TIME single point contact. At least one teacher will have to be present at ALL team meetings - this is a HUGE commitment. You will also need a way for the students to get to the team site - this usually means a school bus after hours AND on saturdays (they are not free).

you need parents and other adults to be involved with travel plans, tracking the team money, feeding the students during long meetings, someone to be a gopher during meetings when you need a new drill bit, or nuts and bolts from the hardware store.

I have been involved with finding new sponsors for teams that were dropped, and starting new teams. Its a TON of WORK!

This is not something you can take on yourself, esp if you are a full time college student. We all want to see new teams formed, but you really NEED this to happen from a corporate or business level and flow DOWN - if you try to build a new team from the bottom up have a room reserved in your name at the psych ward - you will have a nervious breakdown sooner or later

:c)