New Team Different Country

[Torboticsmember]

We have a foreign exchange student on our team from Germany that has been here for the past year and is going back to Germany during the summer. During the Bayou regional I came up, off hand, with the idea of getting him to start a team in Germany where he lives, and us helping him set it up and start it. And since then we are taking it seriously and we want to do it. So we have already started to talk to him about how to get the team going, what he will probably need to do and such. But we don't know everything we need to do to actually have this happen. So if anybody has started another team in a different country before can you help us out.
How did you stay in communication?
What did you do to help the new team get started?
questions like that any response will be appreciated.
also are there any other teams in Germany that might be able to help them?
thanks

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Torboticsmember

How did you stay in communication?
What did you do to help the new team get started?
questions like that any response will be appreciated.
also are there any other teams in Germany that might be able to help them?
thanks

I'd say CD would be a good communication tool.

As for other teams, there are none. The nearest teams would be in Great Britain. (The legendary team 1337 was reputed to be German, but if they even existed, they never competed.)

[Chris Herold]

Hey, I am myself a German exchange student and really interested in starting a team at my school. I don't know your exchange student but you might want to give me the contact information.
I don't know about your recent progress but I already talked to several of the other European teams. I was offered a lot of help and information there. Thanks again for that.
I hope I will be able to start a team. In case he would be able to start a team, I would be glad to collaborate with him and help wherever I can.
Well, I would plan to ask some specialists from the other teams, such as my momentary team (1983-the Skunkworks) to help by spending some time with our students and explaining things. I, myself would really like to learn some programming that way in off-season.

Please, could you submit an email address? The area where he or she goes to school would be really interesting too. Germany is not too big and we might live close...I would really like to talk to your exchange student since I am in exactly the same situation...will you be at Atlanta? Thanks a lot!

[Nawaid Ladak]

i think the people who your going to have to ask are the people who started teams in different countries (Blizzard in 97 or 98 in canada) and 383 would be good places

you might also want to check out the Presidents Circle on You tube and start looking into sponsors

another great source would be team 433. the Fire birds, their an all girls team from PA who started a team in Africa, though they weren't able to get the funding they needed, i think that team number was 1872

[Bharat Nain]

I would also suggest contacting FIRST and asking for their advice and support. I think they like to be involved in starting teams in other countries.

[GaryVoshol]

Team 1025 has taken an alternative path. We became acquainted with some students in South Africa (RSA) several years ago, through mentors' common interest in LEGO Early Robotics for young elementary ages. Since it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to create a team in RSA, students there are members of 1025. We communicate via email and Skype. They handle some tasks there, while we build the competition robot here. This season they built a practice robot there with some old parts that were sent to them. 7 team members came to Michigan last week, and have been participating in cultural exchange in our schools and learning more about robots from a 2-year-old robot we had on hand. We will travel together to Atlanta this week. FIRST has a large LEGO League presence in RSA, but currently a FRC program would not be sustainable. Until that becomes possible, we will continue to pursue the intercontinental teamwork path.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Bharat Nain

I would also suggest contacting FIRST and asking for their advice and support. I think they like to be involved in starting teams in other countries.

Yeah I definitely agree. Get FIRST involved a little and don't be afraid because they'll still let you keep it as your own project, they won't try to take over or anything.

edit: At least you won't have to worry about sponsorship: BMW, Benz, and many more...all the good stuff is in Germany

[Dancin103]

If you want him to show his school or community a website of a FIRST team that is in German, he can use ours, there is a button that translates the whole thing into German. (one of our largest sponsors is based out of Germany) Maybe this could help. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

www.cybersonics.org

[DarkJedi613]

Originally Posted by EricH

As for other teams, there are none. The nearest teams would be in Great Britain. (The legendary team 1337 was reputed to be German, but if they even existed, they never competed.)

It looks like there've been 4 German teams:
936 (Competed 2002 - 2003)
1337
1587
2282 (Competed 2007)

There doesn't really seem to be any information about them (where they were, etc.) So I'm not really sure you'd be able to get in contact with them and see how they did it?

I've attached a SQL query for all the teams not in the US/CA, maybe you can find some contact information, etc. on their sites. (It's an HTML file so remove the ".txt" at the end -- CD won't let me upload HTML. I can give other formats (CSV, XLS) if wanted).