Colleges and FIRST - a little help

[Deej]

WPI-The one and only sponosor of our team. Since the very beginning, they have been there for our team. The provide the resources (monetary, building space, machines, all extras) for the team. We have one faculty advisor on the team, and the rest is made of engineering students and high schoolers. All ideas come from the high school students, who then in turn work with the engineering students to design and build. The high school students get first hand experience with designing, and actually machine parts for the bot. No paid engineers, just college students volunteering their time to help inspire the high schoolers. The program is year round, we do off season competitions (7 this past year), as well as demos for area schools, churches, etc.....(we are well over 60 at this point, and we had 2 demos this week with last year's robot). We are mentors for other teams in the area when they first started up (I think theres about 6 or so that we helped start). The upper brass of our university is competely behind the organization, as they see what we do, and how we do it. There have been studies that relate of the incoming freshman classes as to how many were part of high school teams, and we've found that basically 1 in 5 incoming WPI students was part of a team in the past. We have representation of over 40 teams amoung out student body. I hope that this answers some of you questions, and if you need more info, feel free to ask.