Please welcome to the FIRST Family...

[Phoenix Spud]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Your new job: Get esteemed education professionals and politicians involved. Its a big job, but I trust that Australia has a good focus on education.

We know that long term this is going to be one of the most important things to do so that FIRST--both FLL and FRC--will grow the way they have in the USA. We are already working on the education aspect. We are going to work at Macquarie University where we already have a bunch of the professors excited as well as the grad students. We has been going around to a bunch of the local high schools (which over here cover both FLL and FRC ages) trying to recruit more kids for the team. Our talk also encourages kids to get involved in STEM even if FIRST is not the right outlet for them.

We would love to get the politicians involved to help grow the programs. Also they might be able to put out some grants to help teams form in more rural areas. (In the outback, sometimes families can be miles from the nearest family, so getting funding for them could be a problem)

The other thing that we want to look at is how to involve the media, since a lot of the morning shows are taped in central Sydney (which is about an hour by train/bus from the university) as well as one of the biggest newspaper in the country is in Sydney. This way we would have a national audience without traveling around the entire nation!

Any help that anyone could give us in any of these areas would be great!