Obama's speech to National Academy of Sciences

[artdutra04]

Personally, I think Woodie said it best, when he said at the Championships that we should be focusing on expanding FTC while strengthening and sustaining the existing FRC teams until the economy improves. And since VRC or Savage Soccer are in the same order of magnitude of expenses/necessary resources as FTC, I'd tack them onto the expansion list as well.

And while FiM and offseason competitions increase the number of matches a FRC team can participate in for $X dollars, they aren't really lowering costs that drastically for teams (event organizers and FedEx Freight are a different story). It still easily takes $10k to participate even in a low-cost FRC FiM style competition (or one regular FRC regional plus half dozen offseason competitions), which for that price you can easily run four or five FTC/VRC teams. I'd rather see five successful FTC/VRC teams than a single struggling FRC team that barely lives on year to year.*

To this day, I still can't understand why when someone hears "we need to expand FIRST!" they only think of FRC. It's really shortsighted, as it's missing the largest potential for "market share growth" FIRST has.

* Please do NOT read this thinking that all FRC teams should fold into multiple smaller FTC/VRC teams. FRC is an excellent program as long as your team can raise at least $16k-$20k per year, a place to fabricate and build their robots, and has strong school/community/sponsor/mentor/engineering support (pick at least three). But for teams who consistently struggle to meet these criteria, several smaller healthy teams are better than one larger team on life-support.