Why these seven countries?

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by XaulZan11

I'm writing a paper about, among other things, the spread or expansion of FIRST. According usfirst.org, teams come from seven countries: Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, Netherlands, U.K., U.S. I'm wondering why FRC has spread to these seven?

As far as Brazil, perhaps contacting someone from team 383 would be wise to find out some answers.

http://wiki.chiefdelphi.com/index.php/383

Província de São Pedro High School has been participating in the FIRST robotics competition since 2000, being the first non-English speaking language school to take part in FIRST.

The countries make sense in natural expansion: Mexico & Canada for reasons stated above.. closest to the home base of FIRST.

UK makes sense.. Language reasons come to mind. Easy to be in a competition when you have the language set already.

Team 759 was the first one from that country. We competed with them in NYC in 2002 and beyond and a former Team Mentor and parent on 237 who has since passed away helped them that year from build season through competion season.

http://wiki.chiefdelphi.com/index.php/759

Israel is an unknown.. the sites for the teams involved are monstly incomplete on the Wiki site, but it looks as if a few of the pioneers in the 2005 Pilot over there decided to jump aboard to this after getting involved in the International Fire Fighting competition and then "graduated" to FIRST.

What or who in particular brought FIRST to Israel? Who knows.

Maybe it was Dean himself doing work over there with DEKA or any of his other companies.. idk.

There were some people here who actually volunteered at the Pilot and the first "real" regional over there who browse CD.
Maybe they can offer some more in depth reasons/explanations.


The last is the Netherlands. LEGO, who has always been a huge supporter/sponsor of FIRST by the LEGO League, is based over there and there are a ton of FLL teams over there...

It would make sense that FRC was the next logical step for these teams who were revolutionizing FLL right in LEGO company's backyard..

http://www.team2037.com/2007season/about.php

The about section kinda goes into some detail about the first FIRST team from the Netherlands, but contact them for more info.

I'm sure we'll see a lot more teams from the Netherlands participate in FRC in the future.