What do you feel about the growth of FIRST?

[Ken Leung]

Thanks for everyone's reply. There's a lot of great thoughts about this program, and problems it face, and potential solutions to to making it easier for this program to survive.

Let's focus on the topic a little bit. I know there are other topics like frustration about how teams are run and qualification for Championship event, but those can be left for another thread.

Couple of things I want to touch upon, and get people to think about: public awareness of this program, the existing School system and how it can support teams, and the nature of FIRST as an organization. I believe it will benefit the discussion if everyone focuses their thoughts in these topics first.


Public awareness:

Like M said, the reward of doing FIRST is the personal satisfaction the participants get every time they build a robot and complete the season. Every time the program made a positive difference in the participants' lives, it's done its job right. The problem is, only those participants got the full reward from the program. The public aren't aware of how much benefit this program is until they have been to a competition, or work with a team.

Really, how do you convince the average person that FIRST is really cool until you expose them to the competition? How do you educate the public about this program and its impact? How do you make lots and lots of people see this so the demand for this program is greater (and thus increasing the support to the teams)?

Surely the media is a really important tool to spread the message, which is about the #1 mechanism out there to pass messages to a large group of people. The school system is another resource too, because a lot of parents have confidence in the schools to educate their kids.

The reason public awareness is so important is kind of like politics. When you show some government representatives that the people want something really badly, and are willing to vote them out if their demand aren't met, then those representatives will be forced to think twice before ignoring those demands. In a similar sense, if the school understands that there is a public demand for that school to have a robotics team, they will think twice about setting the school budget. Just think, if the PTA board is filled with energetic parents who really understand the impact of FIRST, they are more likely to ask the school to do something about it.

That's just the local level of public awareness. In a state wide scale, if the school districts are showing a demand for robotics teams in their high school, it is more likely that the state will do something about it. Again, people = power, when you have lots and lots of people behind the cause.


The question about existing school system supporting FIRST teams:

I totally agree that schools should support teams themselves, and rely less on corporations out there hanging dry by the economy. There are funding in school right now, you can see them at the sport teams and music department. The problem is how to get the school to support the cause. This is where public awareness comes in. With the community is behind the team, it is more likely that the school will help out. When more and more schools are showing their support in the program, and the teams are showing positive results in the students to the school and the district, then it is more likely that more schools will help the teams out.

Once you got the school backing you up, it is much easier for teams to survive. The sheer number of school means a potential of 1 team in every city in the future. We just got to some how get the system to incorporate this new program into themselves.


And finally, before I let everyone go and have some time to think, I want to talk about the FIRST organization itself.

At the current status, they are a non-profit organization, and therefore are extremely limited in money and resources. Everything is tight on budget for them. As more and more teams join the program, the staff to teams ratio will drop lower and lower. They don't have the resource to hire more staff, and as a result they won't be able to support all the teams out there. Right now, they have about 15 staff member. How do you expect them to interact with all 800 teams? In the future, I suspect FIRST can only focus in creating the game, putting together a simple kit of parts with a good additional hardware list, hammer out the game rule, and host the competition at regionals and the championship event. Anything beyond that will be really hard for a non-profit organization to do. If teams want support, they will have to work hard themselves, and form organizations like WRRF.


So, think about those three topics before you go any further thinking about the growth of FIRST. I believe these three topics are essential to the possibility of FIRST's growth. Mean while, other aspect of this discussion are still open, such as "the success and down fall of a bigger FIRST", "returning FIRST participants taking a bigger role after they are done with school", and "more things that can be done to help FIRST expand".

Just one more thing to keep in mind. In my opinion, the point of FIRST is to expose more and more students out there and inspire them to be more interested in science and technology related areas. If the goal of FIRST is to have a positive impact in the culture and future generation of students, they will have to expand the program to every school across the country. It's not a matter of should they do it or not... It's a matter of how.