IEEE: A Call to Action from Dean Kamen

[ngreen]

Originally Posted by rforystek

Nothing against kamen or FIRST, but there is one big problem with this. How does he expect a FIRST team in every school if you have a base 6000 dollar entry fee? Not many places can come up with 6+ thousand every year. I think this would become a much more realistic dream if modifications were made so that FIRST did not cost so much. (I'm still waiting for that cost breakdown )

I hate to call you on this but $6,000 for every high school in the country isn't unrelalistic. Just look at the money school districts use to fund athletic teams. My school's district is currently working out an 8 million dollar bond issue. Nearly half of that eight million is headed to athletic teams. This is in a school district with only one high school and aroun 700 high school students. To say they don't have 6000 dollars is untrue. To say they might not place education as high as athletics some time is true. At least how I see my district. If you can consider putting field turf in for the football team you should be able to appropriate $6,000 for a robotics team. IMHO.