Wow! Kansas FIRST Team Explosion! 2.15 Million Grant

[Chris_Elston]

Anyone live in Kansas? If you do, you can pretty much start up a FIRST team in a five county area.

QUOTE:
"Currently, there are only two Robotics teams in the five-county Kansas City area (Jackson, Clay and Platte counties in Missouri, and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas). The Kauffman Foundation's grant will make it possible to expand to more than 60 teams - thus providing the opportunity for most high schools in the five-county area to form a team and participate. The grant will also allow the Kansas City FIRST organization to host its first regional Robotics competition in the spring of 2007. "

Link to news article:
http://www.kauffman.org/news.cfm?itemID=630

[wonsi88]

Way to go Kansas. Its awesome to hear that theres going to be more teams. That means more people will get involved and be apart of this life-changing program. Cant wait to meet them who every they might be at competitions.

[jts]

Team 909 is very grateful to have access to the grant and is excited to be able to stay close to home in 2007.

[sanddrag]

Wow, now all I have to do is build a robotic mentor so I can start a team in Kansas!

[phrontist]

Woah!

[Damian Manda]

It will be great to have another regional in the interior of the US. As can be seen on the map of regionals, the Colorado regional is the only one in our area. We have never been able to go to a second regional partially due to the cost of flying anywhere. Kansas City is still a ways from Colorado, but would be feasible to drive, and is at least closer than Arizona or Las Vegas. This will also be good for any teams in nearer area, as I know our team is grateful to now have the Colorado Regional, making it easier to attend a competition. The cost of travel is often a major factor, so hopefully this grant will enable some new teams to come from Kansas and the surrounding states by making funding less of an issue. If some new teams are started this year, I look forward to them perhaps attending the Colorado Regional.

[ngreen]

Yeah. There has been a lot of people working on this and I want to thank Kaufmann and everyone who has helped with this. There will still be a lot of work in getting teams up and going and for the regional in 2007.

We are working on getting former FIRST students that are at Kansas State organized in a group to be a resource for the teams and help with the regional. I've talked about it with one of the central heights team members and know several of the members up here. But if you're interested in the group my e-mail is ngreen@ksu.edu . The goal is two meet maybe monthly to decide ways we can help. We're not interested at forming a team associate with the college at least this year but want to be a resource. If other college student have such a group I would be interested in hearing about how you operate and what you do to help the area teams (eg mentoring, tech assistance, fundraise, help at regionals, etc)

[KORN_lover_2007]

Team 1108 is proud to be helping all these new teams in our home state and we're proud to be helping with the 2007 Kansas regional. It's awesome! And I'm glad that there is a lot of support from other teams to be getting this regional in Kansas and all these new teams.

[Damian Manda]

Hey, I was right about some of these teams coming to the Colorado Regional. There are currently 12 teams sponsored by the foundation signed up for Colorado, of which 9 look to be new. Good luck to these teams, and I look forward to competing with them in March.