Dean's BAE Homework--political propaganda

[nuggetsyl]

Originally Posted by Petey

Agreed. The problem is not mentors, as Dean said. The problem is money.

FIRST needs to make it less expensive or convince the government or some giant corporation to subsidize programs.

But that won't happen as long as similarly expensive football, etc programs don't receive such funding beyond the local level.

--Petey

How much does you fooball team cost your school????? Yet they find money for that.

shaun

[sgeorge]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

How much does you fooball team cost your school????? Yet they find money for that.

shaun

Yes, they do find money for the sports teams and not for much else. That will not change. As long as we need to continue to beg from taxpayers and corporations for funding we continue to prove Dean wrong.
We don't have a shortage of mentors. We have a huge shortage of available funds.
We continue to see teams win regional events and not be able to afford to attend the championship. That is a lack of funds, not a lack of mentors.
FIRST is too expensive for the startup organization to sustain without a lot of outside money to help them along.

Just my 2 cents worth

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by sgeorge

Yes, they do find money for the sports teams and not for much else. That will not change.

I think you have to be more positive. I think that there should be more of a push for Schools to treat FIRST teams like varsity sports. A good way to gain some ground with schools is to try and start a robotics class so that the program is integrated into the curriculum.

[Nawaid Ladak]

You should have your letter handwritten and mailed off for like (whats the price of stamps again, they always seem to go up) $.37USD or $.39USD (w/e it is), that way, it is ALWAYS filtered by hand. and it has a better chance of getting on your congressman's desk. also, you can send a seprete copy to FIRST Place, or Dean's Personal Resedence. with a recipt from Kinko's or the UPS store for like $.10USD.

Im gona do my letter for my team before the Florida Regional, so we can hand it to the Governer himself when he is there on friday.

[Martinez]

The problem I see it is more of communication and publicity then necciarly funds. Yes, the Robotics program is extremely expensive however unlike a football team the money should not be coming from the educational system ie taxpayers but rather through corporations. The idea at least in my mind is to get local industries in technology to support the community through financial investment into a robotics program. Really your comparing apples to oranges.

However, how are we going to obtain the goal of one robotics team to every high school in America and then the world?

People need to know it exist.
The public needs to know the good its doing.
Corporations need to see its worth the investment.

One way to achive this is to talk to our politicians. Constantly they talk about supporting programs that keep kids off the streets, teach them strong moral values and educating them for high tech fields. FIRST does all three, a proven model that works.

Imagine what would happen if Govenour Pataki, Senator Clinton or even President Bush came out and said I support FIRST. This would serve to raise public awarness of the program which in of itself would spearhead new teams.

Close to know one in the Owego area knows about FIRST. I have had three meetings with upper management at Lockheed not just because I'm trying to get their approval but also to educate them as to what it is. They are not even aware of the 30+ Lockheed supported teams.

Really what we need to do is get the word out there. Writing a letter to your Congress Person is exactly that.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

How much does you fooball team cost your school????? Yet they find money for that.

shaun

yeah here in texas they find the money for football by cutting art/music/AP classes.

but I must agree with the above poster that the problem is not mentorship its sponsership . . pearce(1745) has been trying to form a team for the past 5 years, and it was only this year that some how we scavanged 6k before the deadline(see. miracle)

[Petey]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

How much does you fooball team cost your school????? Yet they find money for that.

shaun

Actually, our football plan is completely privately funded.

I should know. I played for it, and helped sell the Varsity Gold Cards that paid for it.

That said, football is an institution. Football is a sport that everyone knows and most everyone cares about to some degree. FIRST does not have that cachet. I go to William and Mary, a few hours away from Dave Lavery and VCU, and I've yet to meet anyone who's even heard of FIRST.

Dean is right when he says that football will not provide as many jobs for people as FIRST will. But he also misses the point--people don't do football because they want to be NFL players necessarily, but because it's fun as hell. But Dean hates sports. This is the man who said that walking was "an unfortunate remnant of the dark ages" while promoting the Segway.

Originally Posted by Stuart

yeah here in texas they find the money for football by cutting art/music/AP classes.

but I must agree with the above poster that the problem is not mentorship its sponsership . . pearce(1745) has been trying to form a team for the past 5 years, and it was only this year that some how we scavanged 6k before the deadline(see. miracle)

Look at "Friday Night Lights" for a good example of a football program that is over the top.

Football has been a school institution for over 100 years--we can't expect FIRST to show the same potential in a 10th of that.

Also, don't forget that football generates revenue through ticket sales, merch sales, and (in big programs), television sales. Does FIRST do that? Not unless you do a postseason regional...

Originally Posted by FreedomForce

You should have your letter handwritten and mailed off for like (whats the price of stamps again, they always seem to go up) $.37USD or $.39USD (w/e it is), that way, it is ALWAYS filtered by hand. and it has a better chance of getting on your congressman's desk. also, you can send a seprete copy to FIRST Place, or Dean's Personal Resedence. with a recipt from Kinko's or the UPS store for like $.10USD.

Im gona do my letter for my team before the Florida Regional, so we can hand it to the Governer himself when he is there on friday.

Great suggestion. I may well do that.

--Petey

[KenWittlief]

been thinking about this over dinner. Resist the urge to run to the government as if you were petitioning the king to solve your problems. If your government representitives dont know what FIRST is all about, then we are better off keeping their hands off until they do.

Lets look at this backwards. Next year we magically have a FIRST team at every HS in your state, or to make it easier to grasp, in your city.

Whats that going to be like?

Will FIRST be able to supply playfields and scoring systems and judges and head refs to every regional in the county, when every HS has a team?

Could IFI possibly have that many control systems built in a year?

Where will the regionals be held? a HS gym? at local collages? Universities? regional events at HS and state playoffs at Universities?

If every HS has a team, and the goal of FIRST is for students to work with engineers and scientists, then where are these 3 or 4 engineers per HS going to come from? What about cities that dont have any local engineering companys to supply mentors? An average size city/ suburbs/ surrounding rural area might have 30 HighSchools. That means you need about 120 engineers/ scientists / technology professionals each year, in each metropolitan area.

I think these are the major issues. Now what can the government do to address these things?

[KenWittlief]

Some thoughts:

Government contracts. The US government spends billions of dollars a year for defense contracts, research, NASA and JPL. What if the government required that, in order to win engineering contracts a company must support the FIRST program by supplying a certain percentage of mentors to FIRST-like programs. Same for universities that get government grants?

Centers and resources: If FIRST standarized on a playfield that could be used every year then we could have FIRST-centers in most cities. A place where HS teams could go to work on their designs, a centralized machine shop, practice field, computer equipment... This would be much easier than having every HS in the area put together its own robotics workshop and practice field every year. A FIRST-center in each city could also employ full time machinsts and mentors, maybe people who have retired from industry and want to do something important with some of their free time?

Transportation: getting students to the local worksite, getting teams to the local events, and even transporting the local champions to the state regionals and championship - these expenses could be funded by the school district, like they do for sports teams.

[Petey]

Ken--

First off, I'm not sure that your first thing is accurate. If we suddenly had a giant thing next year with all the high schools involved, you'd have a problem with infrastructure, but not if the infrastructure had been built up over years.

Although, you have to assume that if there are divisions in high school sports, there would be divisions of FIRST (D1A, D1AA, etc, maybe based on engineers involved or team budget).

Now that I think about it...I'm not entirely sure a FIRST team at every school would be the best thing for the organization as a whole. You can't be a homegrown organization with strong personal and personnel ties AND be ubiquitous.

Gov't Contracts: I like that idea, but you're talking about mandating private business to do extra service for the gov't and I'm not sure I like that.

Centers: True that. You only have to look at the discrepency between our machine shop (a classroom with a few tables and saws) and the Nashua South machine shop (blast furnaces, multiple CMD machines, in a room the size of our gym) to see that for true standardization of FIRST we need to standardize the means of production. But will Dean, as an entrepreneur and businessman, support this? I doubt it. Besides, FIRST thrives in part because only 30 people (or whatever absurdly low number Dean said at BAE) work for it full time. Everyone else is a volunteer. Imagine how much money it would cost if teams also had to subsidize machine shops, machinists, and mentors!

Transportation: That won't happen until FIRST has the cachet of sports teams, which won't happen until politicians listen and national media publicize us. Schools like mine don't even have the money for extra classrooms, much less funding sports teams for championships. In fact, I don't think we do subsidize those trips--I think our sports teams might even have to pay. As I said earlier, our football team is entirely privately funded. Our sports teams travel by school bus and thus if the school funds anything it funds diesel fuel.

--Petey

[Martinez]

Ok, I had an awsome thought at FLR and wanted to walk you guys through it. Who here knows about American Forces in Europe, Department of Defense Schooling (AFE DoDS)?

I'm a military brat. Grew up in the Air Force my first 15 years with some of that time spent in Germany during middle school. Living on the base, it was litterally an American getto. Every one around you is military, speaks english and your teachers are all Americans. There is not a whole lot to do most of the time, and the base commanders support nearly anything to keep the kids busy and active in a good environment. The military loves the Scouting movement, with nearly every base having a troop now. Our building, bus even the gear were completely free, second hand mostly but very fine stuff. They also love technology. I had video editing, computer literacy, and music composition classes while only in 7th grade. Which comes to the third part, money. A budget for a AFE DoDS is insainely huge, easily four times that of your typical district and they get alot of cool toys. With a graduating class of 50, we likely had the budget of one with 300 with some of the best teachers in the world.

So, my idea: lets see some AFE DoDS FIRST teams! From past experience, I think the higher ups would go for it whole heartedly. In my mind, FIRST is the best of the Boy Scouts combine with a technology aproach. It would also be a good opertunity to get a strong "foot hold" in Europe. So what I propose to do is write a letter addressed to the Base Commander and Principal for Bitburg American High School. Its been nearly 10 years, so I doubt anyone I know is still there. At this point I'd have to do some serious digging just to find an address. But hey, why the heck not?! Some time this week I'll draft a letter and post it here, see what fokes think before sending it off.

[Petey]

That sounds like a great idea.

Did you ever manage to send off that letter?

--Petey

p.s. If any of you didn't get the latest email blast, the correct email to CC FIRST on these things is homework@usfirst.org