How has the economic crisis affected your team?

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Cory

We are in the unique position of not being allowed to fund raise by our school ...

If anything it'll probably get worse before it gets better.

It's a good things we're engineers who regularly squeeze out 'miracles' with a severely limited budget, eh? I think that's an important aspect that we as mentors need to show the students from time to time, and this year is a perfect opportunity.

We're in a similar situation -- the school district restricts clubs and sports to two fundraisers per school year, and the fundraisers have to be approved a year in advance. I'm not sure why that's the way it is, but we live with it and got by ok in past years.

This year's probably a different story.

We only wanted 2 FTC teams this year but wound up having such a successful student recruitment that we were almost forced to found 4 teams. Luckily we had 4 last year so this year's registration didn't kill our budget completely. Our FRC prototype platform will use many more scrap parts than we had originally intended. Something tells me our production FRC robot will be more of the same. Hopefully the rules don't change and still allow us to use unmodified COTS products purchased and used in the 2008 game.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by JesseK

It's a good things we're engineers who regularly squeeze out 'miracles' with a severely limited budget, eh? I think that's an important aspect that we as mentors need to show the students from time to time, and this year is a perfect opportunity.

In terms of funding, often there is no way around the cost of regional fees and travel costs. There really isn't a way to engineer around them, especially considering they make up far more of the budget than robot cost.