Robotics Internationally

[Lil' Lavery]

Considering the first non-North American regional was created in 2005 in Israel, the fact that FIRST will be creating it's 2nd in Brazil just 2 years later is astounding. As mentioned by Greg earlier, it used to be US FIRST, not just FIRST. Every year, at the Championship, kick-off, and regionals, Dean talks about how FIRST was created because AMERICA was falling behind in science and technology. While international expansion is great, and eventually may become the primary focus of FIRST, it should be a secondary desire in the immediate future. Not until FIRST is in every public school in the United States will I say we are ready to shift our focus and make international teams the primary effort of FIRST.

[OZ_341]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

.......While international expansion is great, and eventually may become the primary focus of FIRST, it should be a secondary desire in the immediate future. Not until FIRST is in every public school in the United States will I say we are ready to shift our focus and make international teams the primary effort of FIRST.

I agree! International initiatives are a nice secondary focus. We don't want this effort to distract us from our mission at home. What our Singapore effort does is actually enhance the strength of our team through partnership and exchange. However, I think the main focus of Team 341 (and hopefully FIRST) will be creating teams in the USA.
Also I get concerned that FIRST will overtax their human resources and be unable to help new and existing local teams succeed. They already seem so stretched to the limit in certain areas. That being said, its hard to stop a great idea from spreading far and wide. FIRST is a powerful concept.

[Evenstar_342]

I think its great that FIRST is trying to expand around the world, it was so exciting to go to the FLL World Festival this year and talk to people from all over the planet. Out of curiosity, does anyone know if a team has tried to start anything FIRST related in Australia? I know its a long way away, but I would think that there would be enough interest and enough possible schools to start teams and hold regionals and have FIRST only fork up the cost to send one or two teams to Atlanta. Also, I was wondering if anyone thinks the Championship event will ever leave the US with FIRST expanding into so many countries? I would think eventually it might be possible to hold the event in Europe.

[RoboMadi]

Think of it as a disease. FIRST (disease) started from USA and now its spreading across the world.
15 years ago, FIRST was only hand full of teams. But now it consist of more than 1500 teams. There are a lot of teams out there who are trying to start teams internationally.
Not to mention that the FLL teams of today, will soon rise to be FRC teams in future....
seriously I'm waiting for the time when my grand children will be part of different FIRST teams, fighting against each other