A Better Competition

[Ken Leung]

Excellent direction for discussion to go! Hats off to Tonya for bringing this idea to this community.

There are couple of angles to look at this idea with.

1. # of volunteers and staff
2. Running a convention
3. Cost of the event
4. # of participants
5. Quality of the convention
6. Scheduling of the workshops
7. PR aspect

Just want to touch on these points without writing too much.

1. From what I've seen last year at Championship Event, FIRST is really stretched just running the CE alone. They have just about enough volunteers to operate each field on schedule, and all the FIRST staff had something to do + the company they hired to help run events. If this is to happen this need to be ran by a seperate group of staff/volunteers. I just don't think FIRST has any more bandwidth to do something at this level. But I am not saying it will be impossible. Far from it. There will be lots and lots of people interested in attending something like this without having to pay more than 10k for the FIRST competition.

2. I believe there need to be professionals to take care of the logistics of this event. It can't be just "just get another space and we will put workshop and stores there". You have to treat it seriously to make it successful.

3. I don't believe FIRST has any extra money from their budget to start this event. So, in order for this to happen, it need to be self sustainable. Again, not impossible. Just look at how past conventions had happened. Also, there can be a lot of work done by volunteers, but I believe a lot of the teachers/staff should get paid for putting up such a convention. As educators doing a service for the rest of the educators, they deserve to earn some money to at least pay for the airplane ticket + hotel, if not a little more to help them raise some fund for their project base learning program.

4. It is important to figure out how many participants you will have ahead of time, and plan your workshops accordingly. I would not want to see 1 class of 400 audience, and then 3 more classes of 4~5 audience. This will also help organize how many workshops there should be, how many room and chair you need, and how many hand out material you should print ahead of time.

5. There needs to be a quality to such event. The workshops have to be thought out ahead of time so their material is well developed. All workshops should be top quality to make it worthwhile. So, you got to make sure each instructor understand what level of quality you are expecting from them.

6. The schedule of the workshops should be organized so that people don't have a hard time choosing between which ones to go. Ideally there will be a few repeat sessions of the workshops , and the schedule rotates so that there are enough workshops during the day. So, say these are 3 hour workshops (just as an example because WRRF workshops are all day hands on ones). You can fit in 3 period in a day. 9:00 to noon, 1:00 to 4:00, and 4:00 to 7:00. Have lunch at noon, and dinner at 7:00. If you have 2 days of workshops, that means an overall 6 workshop for each person. However, I see some value in making it 6 session and have a 3 hour period just for socalizing.

7. If this event is promoted well, a lot of teachers will participate. This should be promoted through other educational convention channels, on top of FIRST's promotion when they do PR for championship event. It will give great exposure for FIRST AND this convention if this effort is a joint one.

Ok, sorry about the long messages. I am excited to see new ideas are brought up! At the same time, I feel that these sort of events should be professional, well organized and thought out to be successful.