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