NASA Grant

[aechmtwash11]

My team is looking to apply for the Nasa grant for veteran teams. From my understanding, in the past teams had to compete at a new Nasa sponsored regional. However, we have not found any information about this season's Nasa grants. Has any had experience with the grant process? Should we wait to sign up for any regionals (we are wanting to go to two (2) regionals) until we hear from Nasa? Thoughts? Suggestions?

[Aren Siekmeier]

Hopefully sometime soon you will be able to find all information pertaining to the 2011 NASA Sponshorship at http://robotics.nasa.gov/events/first.php by clicking the link that is currently broken. I've heard from a few people that it would be up soon after registration opens on 9/30.

In the past, NASA has offered sponsorships to rookie teams, second-year teams who received a rookie grant, veteran teams attending first year regionals, and some few veteran teams who were in need of sustenance and not eligible for anything else (these are actually called Sustenance Grants I believe).

If nothing changes, our team is also looking at applying for a sponsorship for the new Duluth regional, so we're waiting for the site to get updated too.

[roborat]

Last year, my team received a NASA grant to the new North Carolina Regional and if i am not mistaken, we had to be registered for that regional as a requirement for the grant process. So, we had to switch our first regional that we had registered for and replaced with NC then go back and add the original regional as a second regional.

[Bethie42]

Our team received a NASA Sustaining Grant last year, which was the only thing between us and a no-regional season.
Our lead mentor [my dad] signed us up for it; I don't think there was any requirement regarding a new regional, but we were required to compete for Chairman's Award, and fill out a post-season survey.

If you're going to try for the sustaining grant, it's good to focus on how, next year, your team will have been able to regroup enough to not need that funding again.....we haven't, though not for any lack of trying.

I'm in the process of writing a grant-app right now, and let me just say that it is a lovely feeling to be able to talk about your team's outreach! This year, despite being broke, we started three FLL teams at our school [an entirely student-led effort btw] and are now engulfed in a sea of LEGOs and little kids. We've got FRC team members mentoring 4th-graders...it is awesome...think of these budding engineers, their dreams being nurtured by geeky high school role models!
There was overwhelming support for FLL at our [all-ages] school: parents, school faculty, and kids are all enthused.
Oh and besides that, we've got an over-excited team member [me] starting a couple of Junior FLL teams in collaboration with the local university's youth outreach program, with a focus on encouraging girls in robotics....then there is the fact that our school now allows homeschoolers on all of its robotics teams, due to the lobbying of a former homeschooled team member....

Gosh, I got off-topic, didn't I! Key point here, start an FLL team, it'll look great on your grant apps...yay FIRST!