Where will FIRST be in 10 years

[Matt Adams]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

If they do, then isnt FIRST somewhat of a sham?

The idea is that a career in engineering and technology is rewarding and leads to a good quality of life. If our engineering and technology companies cannot afford to lend 3 or 4 engineers to each HS, after hours for several weeks each year, then is the promise of a professional career just an illusion?

$6,000 is nothing to a company that has 20 engineers on its payroll. Ive seen engineers spend more than that on a single oscilloscope, or even a high end laptop computer.

Though I don't think you intended to, Ken, it sort of appears you really downplayed the two really ugly sides of FIRST that in my opinion are holding it back in terms of growth. Please forgive me if I'm hijacking this thread a bit, I'm going to kick out some thoughts on what FIRST could be in 10 years if it did things 'right'. Naturally these comments are merely coming from the peanut gallery and moderately off the cuff.

I'm not going to beat the money issue to death, as it's certainly a dead horse. Nevertheless it's an ugly dead horse that every team needs to step over in order to participate. With every team change I make, I'm always shocked about how many people don't understand how incredibly expensive FIRST really is. As I'm sure you know, Ken, no FIRST teams run on $6,000. I'm not going to throw too many numbers out there, but when you have what we'll call an average sized teams going to a few competitions and nationals, it's closer to $30,000 (plus or minus), and naturally most of it is travel costs.

The second thing that's holding FIRST back is that it requires too much time from the average, yet sincerely willing volunteer to put in. And though this might sound a bit arrogant coming out of an adult volunteer, let's not downplay the "after hours" volunteering. We're not talking about 2 or 3 hours on a Saturday, we're talking about 20,30,40 hours a week for 6 1/2 weeks that would be available for mentors to be spending with family and friends, and that's just the regular season. There's no need to joke about the pre-season, regular season, post-season and off-season, we all know the reality of that! If we're going to talk about recruiting engineering volunteers, you basically have to say, "Hi, do you have a spare couple hundred hours a year to volunteer?" If we want FIRST to get broad and far reaching, these hundreds of hours need to be spread out over several months, not weeks.

FIRST doesn't merely require "3 or 4 engineers to each high school", it takes 3 or 4 (preferably even more?) very special people. You just can't go around and ask a fellow engineering co-worker if they "have a couple hours each week to help out with some high school students build a robot" - FIRST is intense! Intensely rewarding but nevertheless incredibly time consuming. I know that there are mentors out there that have strain in their marriage because of their commitment with FIRST. It's sort of unspoken publicly, but it's a very real issue.

So to swing this back on topic.... in 10 years, I think FIRST will be bigger, but it could be much much bigger if it were to jump over the two hurdles of being financially prohibitive and more friendly to potential mentors.

The 'easiest' way to do reduce costs is to hack away at the most expensive part of a FIRST team - travel. The 'easiest' way to to this is to increase the number and locations of regional competitions. If you can drive to a regional each day and not spend money on hotels or flights, the budgets can drop quite significantly.

I quote 'easiest' because for anyone who has seen the immense amount of planning and coordinating required to setup a FRC regional understands it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do than running a team. In my opinion, regional committee planning members are among the most under-appreciated folks in FIRST but far and away among the most important to FIRST's long term success.

As for the mentor commitment, I the only real way I can see this potentially working has been raised too many times to count. I think you'd need to increase the length of the build season. And I'm not talking by a week or two, (which I think would just make the situation worse because the intensity would stay the same for a longer period of time.) I think you might need to stretch the build season something like 4 months. At this point you could have average teams meeting 2 or 3 days a week and get a pretty polished robot if you stay organized. While we all know that the big teams will be coming to the 1st regional with incredibly stellar, potentially dominating machines, it would bring the amount of commitment for the average mentor on the average team to something that's much more reasonable.

FIRST in the past several years has been asking for more and more complex robots, and, especially this year, there has been more and more restrictive on the time to do it in. And I know that time tested response is that '6 weeks is part of the challenge', but ultimately isn't the real challenge to make FIRST more accessible, and isn't the money and time crunch making it less so?

Anyway.. those are some off the cuff thoughts. Good luck this season!

Matt

[Brian C]

Matt Adams wrote:
let's not downplay the "after hours" volunteering. We're not talking about 2 or 3 hours on a Saturday, we're talking about 20,30,40 hours a week for 6 1/2 weeks that would be available for mentors to be spending with family and friends, and that's just the regular season. There's no need to joke about the pre-season, regular season, post-season and off-season, we all know the reality of that! If we're going to talk about recruiting engineering volunteers, you basically have to say, "Hi, do you have a spare couple hundred hours a year to volunteer?"


Matt,

I'm glad that someone brought this up as it has a HUGE bearing on the ability of FIRST to expand. While I firmly believe that mentoring is an important thing to do (otherwise I wouldn't be here) Some folks need to realize that it is not always the companies that are "lending" their engineers and personnel to FIRST teams. In many instances (probably a higher percentage than most folks realize) the people who are volunteering to mentor teams and work regionals are doing so because THEY want to not because their company is loaning them out. My personal belief is that a fair majority of mentors are involved because of the personal satisfaction they get from the experience.

That being said, FIRST is still the best thing for high school students to be exposed to the possibilities available to them in life.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Matt Adams

The 'easiest' way to do reduce costs is to hack away at the most expensive part of a FIRST team - travel. The 'easiest' way to to this is to increase the number and locations of regional competitions. If you can drive to a regional each day and not spend money on hotels or flights, the budgets can drop quite significantly.

I quote 'easiest' because for anyone who has seen the immense amount of planning and coordinating required to setup a FRC regional understands it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do than running a team. In my opinion, regional committee planning members are among the most under-appreciated folks in FIRST but far and away among the most important to FIRST's long term success.

Many who post here have served the mission of FIRST in multiple roles. This year I have been a member of my regional committee, an organizer and presenter at our regional off-season training event, a mentor for my team, and a volunteer at our VEX demonstration event. Later this week I'll be a volunteer at our regional FRC event. Since the 2005 Championship, I have probably spent over 300 hours on FIRST. Through all this involvement I have met and worked with many people who dedicate more time and energy to FIRST than I do, and that's just here in St. Louis. Growing FIRST to include every HS in the country will require, among many other challenges, recruiting thousands of dedicated people to plan the local events.

[KenWittlief]

Matt has picked up on a couple of issues, but I think there are answers

Travel. If every HS has a team, then there can be regionals in every city, which means nobody will need to travel to attend at least one regional.

If only one or two teams from each local event go on to the next level of competition, then part of the fee for the local event could be used to send those teams - you would actually be winning a trip to the next competition, the funds coming from all the teams who played at the local event.

Regarding mentors, FIRST would be much easier if more teams were willing to take a minimal approach. Im an electrical engineer. Everytime I try to fabricate something out of metal it ends up looking like someone stomped on a beer can, but I would be perfectly willing to mentor a team with no mechanical engineers, because I know we could build a robot with all the 'given' systems in the KOP (the kit drivetrain, transmissions, pneumatics....). All the magic in our robot would be the electronics, the sensors, the SW, auton programming, feedback on the control system.

I think its safe to say that most engineers in the US have little or no mechanical design work involvement at their day-jobs. Why cant we be (the only) mentors for teams, knowing the mechanical aspects of our robots will be off-the-shelf?

The students on the team would learn all about programming, electronics, sensors, feedback, control theory, problem solving, the engineering design cycle.... They just wouldnt get much exposure to mechanical engineering.

This approach would open the doors to a flood of companies to be primary sponsors, esp if there was recognition for off-the-shelf robot designs at the competitions.