Texas Registration 2015

[lynca]

Its another year of FRC and the Texas FRC registration numbers continue to decline.
Current FRC Texas registration is around 104 teams, which is a significant drop from 132 in 2013.

Here's a chart of Texas Registration Growth since 2003
http://2013.discobots.org/node/84

On the positive side, many other STEM programs are growing quickly in Texas. If anyone would like to discuss those statistics, I would be happy to provide a few numbers.

[sanddrag]

What is causing the loss of teams in Texas? It's rather concerning, especially as FIRST pushes for growth. Is it that teams sign up, get a NASA grant (or some other kind of grant), and then a year or two later there's no more grant, and they cease to exist any longer?

To keep this program sustainable, on a national and state level, we really need to work on funding at least the minimum annual budget requirements of FIRST teams through state and federal education funding sources for career technical education. Selling lightbulbs and getting corporate sponsorships is great, but it does not work in all areas and will not continue to work forever.

[Redo91]

Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn't the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?

What is the growth of other STEM programs?

[ebmonon36]

Here's the thread from last year that discusses the growth from 2009-2012:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=120776

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Redo91

Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn't the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?

What is the growth of other STEM programs?

The JCP spike is the 2011 season. At least, for most of the US. Unless they started sponsoring teams in Texas earlier.

[wireties]

Originally Posted by Redo91

Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn't the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?

What is the growth of other STEM programs?

I thought it due to the TWC program? They were promoting new teams in Texas for two years, correct?

FIRST and UIL/Texas are talking and the TEA is approving or starting to approve more robotics classes. In our district robotics classes and computer science classes can now count as math and science credits. For the FIRST (pun intended) time this year there is an official STEM track for a high school diploma. This is only a rumor but I think AP Computer Science 2 qualifies as a foreign language credit! Plus we now have a Cyber Patriot team and our sister high school (Rockwall-Heath High School, home of FRC 3310) won an International Rocketry Competition in 2013. This is all in the last few years.

[rsegrest]

Originally Posted by wireties

FIRST and UIL/Texas are talking and the TEA is approving or starting to approve more robotics classes. In our district robotics classes and computer science classes can now count as math and science credits.

It is not about TEA approval it is about district approval. The robotics classes have been on the books for four years under CTE. Districts are just now picking them up. Whether that is due to having qualified teachers on staff or because STEM is the current buzz word in education today is something each district has to answer separately.

CTE (Career and Technical Education) is under a standards review. All of our TEKs are being reviewed and rewritten. Yes, you/we, will be getting more STEM/robotics classes. The battle is getting the core subject areas and districts to recognize the value of STEM courses taught under CTE along with those taught under the math and science departments.

Originally Posted by wireties

For the FIRST (pun intended) time this year there is an official STEM track for a high school diploma.

Thank you HB5 (House Bill 5) one of several things I really like about it but it only applies to current freshmen, students on the 4x4graduation plan (current sophomores - seniors) don't get that 'STEM' endorsement opportunity...or any of the others for that matter.

Originally Posted by wireties

This is only a rumor but I think AP Computer Science 2 qualifies as a foreign language credit!

Fact not fiction or rumor. It was approved by the Texas legislature and TEA in January. Here is the catch...that qualification expires in 2016. No one knows what's going to happen after that. Also, I am not sure what the teacher certification requirements are in order for it to count. I can find out and let you know but I think the awarding of the FL credit for CompSci is largely up to the district not dictated by TEA.

The CTE Computer Programming course re-writers toyed with asking for their course to count as a foreign language credit, however; the concern became what certification/re-certification TEA would require of the instructors to be considered qualified to offer the foreign language credit.

Hope this helps some and if you are teaching AP CompSci (or your district is) you need to look into the Foreign language thing now before it expires so that when that comes up for review you can hopefully keep it.

[lynca]

Originally Posted by Redo91

Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn't the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?

The spike in growth was related to JCPenny and the TWC grants. The decline of team registrations is not as clear.

Originally Posted by Redo91

What is the growth of other STEM programs?

Many of these numbers include multiple sub-teams inside a single school.

FTC in Texas :
81 teams in 2009 season
300 teams in 2013 season

VEX (VRC) in Texas:
106 teams in 2009-2010 season
562 teams in 2013-2014 Season

[jee7s]

Originally Posted by lynca

The spike in growth was related to JCPenny and the TWC grants. The decline of team registrations ...

Follow the money, Andy. A lot of teams were almost totally reliant on that funding. There's a reason only 13 of the 50 2009 rookies are still around. Only two of us have WFFA winners, and only 2 or 3 have at least one regional victory. That was a rough year, before I got to Texas, and one that is often recalled as painful by the surviving participants.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by jee7s

Follow the money, Andy. A lot of teams were almost totally reliant on that funding. There's a reason only 13 of the 50 2009 rookies are still around. Only two of us have WFFA winners, and only 2 or 3 have at least one regional victory. That was a rough year, before I got to Texas, and one that is often recalled as painful by the surviving participants.

There has to be some other important factor here besides the JCP grants though. A whole bunch of MN teams were founded off of those grants back in 2010/2011 as well, but almost none of them have folded.

Here are the relevant documents I could dig up:
2010 (I think) JCP sponsored teams
2011 JCP sponsored teams

According to the second document, JCP sponsored 21 Rookie/2nd Year Teams in MN, and 28 in TX.
As of the 2014 competition season:
only 2/21 of these MN teams are inactive (3747 and 3524)
14/28 of these TX teams are inactive (3819, 3758, 3409, 3713, 3778, 3730, 3392, 3804, 3857, 3696, 3369, 3529, 3762, and 3869)

Perhaps it is not a useful analysis to compare MN to TX, since both regions seem to be outliers in terms of growth/sustainability (on opposite sides of the spectrum). I'm just curious as to why MN seems to be doing so well in this area, especially since there were no sustaining teams here prior to 2006.

Maybe since MN didn't have very many other robotics programs in 2010-2011, the teams here didn't really have the option to "drop down" to a less resource-intensive competition and thus were forced to stick through the sponsorship crunch? That seems silly, but I can't come up with a better explanation.

[s1900ahon]

Andy,

What is the geographic distribution of the lost teams? Larger cities? West Texas? I ask only because I don't recall losing 2/3 of teams around the Austin area.

[lynca]

Originally Posted by s1900ahon

Andy,

What is the geographic distribution of the lost teams? Larger cities? West Texas? I ask only because I don't recall losing 2/3 of teams around the Austin area.

The biggest losses are definitely more rural or small city schools. I can put exact numbers on these with a little data crunching if people are interested.

Texas Regions that struggle.
1. South Texas
2. El Paso
3. West Texas
4. Small towns scattered across the state.

[Coach Norm]

Originally Posted by lynca

The biggest losses are definitely more rural or small city schools. I can put exact numbers on these with a little data crunching if people are interested.

Texas Regions that struggle.
1. South Texas
2. El Paso
3. West Texas
4. Small towns scattered across the state.

I was raised in the Texas Panhandle. I went to a small high school (six students in my graduating class.) I know how hard it would be to not only start an FRC team but to maintain it in such a small community. My father was an agriculture teacher and he would have been the closest qualifying individual to being a mentor for our team. Many of the teams from West Texas and the Texas Panhandle would fall in the category of small class sizes, little to no computer science taught in the high school, large farming and ranching communities, small amount of financial support from industry, etc. In small schools, students participate in multiple activities at the same time since there is not a large population of students.

Last year, we worked with a team at Hub City that had two mentors and seven students. I think that there are probably more teams that fall into circumstances such as these. I know of a team here in Austin that folded due to the teacher leaving and losing their only technical mentor.

Just as increasing the success of a school, many times it falls on a committed individual and most often that falls on the shoulders of a teacher. Many schools do not a financial structure to compensate teachers for this commitment. FIRST is seeking to get a partnership with UIL in the state with the hopes that this will lead to more finances and support from within the schools. School finance in Texas is in a mess and does not look to be be getting any better in the near future. I believe it is a false hope that such a partnership will open the books up to financing of many teams in the future.

It is very interesting that Minnesota has such a large number of FLL teams and they have seen an increase in the number of FRC teams. Laying the groundwork at younger ages drives success and creates interest not only at the student level but at the elementary level as well. Having taught in public school classroom and being a fourth generation teacher with in Texas. The support of elementary programs from parents is huge. As students begin to move thru school, parental involvement continues to dwindle. Parent support of a program is instrumental in assisting the mentors and teachers of the program.

As some others have mentioned here, geographic isolation is another big factor. Not only is the distance to contests but the distance to supporting veteran teams is a great distance as well.

I also believe that the prevalence of other STEM/Robotics contest in the state have played a factor. The growth of FTC and VEX has been huge in the state of Texas. see post from Andy about the number of teams in the past few years. In addition, BEST robotics continues to be successful throughout the state of Texas. These contests do offer a truly beneficial STEM program to the schools that chose to participate in them. Schools chose to participate in them for a variety of reasons: past experience, costs to startup, space, tools requirement, mentor availability, etc.

I believe Andy's questions are great questions. I also believe something could be learned from the Kansas City growth FRC that included 3 year commitment finances partnership between the teams and grants available.

[AllenGregoryIV]

That's a good summary Norm.

One of the programs that helped grow teams in the 2009-2011 range was the Texas High School Project. There isn't much information online about it but this word doc sums up the program pretty well. Basically it gave schools about $18,000 over two years.

Does anyone have a list of teams that were founded using this money and how many are still around? From the little I know, not many of teams stuck around. A quick search through the team358 database says that 18 teams had "Texas High School Project" as one of their sponsors and are no longer competing as of 2014. Many of the schools were supported by both THSP and JCPenny.

After the poor retention rates that we saw for so many years, I know a lot of veteran Texas teams/mentors that shy away from actively encouraging schools to start FRC teams without some experience with a smaller competition 1st. There are so many other options (FTC/VEX/BEST/Botball/MATE/etc.) to allow schools to get into competition robotics that don't have the costs and drop out rates of an FRC team. I know whenever possible I try to convince teams to take a year and really watch a full season before doing FRC. It's so much easier to start a program when you have some idea of what it actually takes than starting blind just because someone is willing to pay your registration fee.

I would love to have Texas rookies competing at a level where they are all in contention for Rookie All Star. We do a ton of work to help prepare rookie teams for the season and work with them during the season but even with that help many of them fold after a year or two. The teams that do the best are those that either have experienced mentors or FRC alumni helping to run their programs but that's not an easy thing to get for a lot of the teams.

From a school perspective I can also see how it would make more sense to compete in several smaller programs. You can have more teams and compete more often where in FRC you may only be able to compete once per year. Now that Texas has a lot more off season FRC events (4 this season), it might become more compelling to compete in FRC.

The fact that FRC is hard is part of the point. It wouldn't be the same competition if it were easy to run a team but that does come with a cost.

[philso]

Originally Posted by Coach Norm

It is very interesting that Minnesota has such a large number of FLL teams and they have seen an increase in the number of FRC teams. Laying the groundwork at younger ages drives success and creates interest not only at the student level but at the elementary level as well... Parent support of a program is instrumental in assisting the mentors and teachers of the program.

Parental support is vital for the health of any youth program. We see stark differences between swim teams that have strong parental support and those that don't. I suspect that a lot of the mentors supporting the FRC teams in Minnesota may have got their start as coaches or mentors for their children's FLL teams. That is where I got started as did a number of the other FRC mentors here in Houston.

Originally Posted by itsjustmrb

My personal opinion is the declination of teams is based more on the mentor ratio, available resources and culture of the school district/town.

The coach of one of the most successful FLL teams in Houston was bemoaning the fact that he had trouble helping to set up new FLL teams because the school district he is in is more interested in football than STEM. Before we moved out of that area, my sons were on two teams there. The first collapsed when the teacher/sponsor retired and could not be replaced. The other had difficulty in getting support from the school district, the school principal and the teachers. They also had trouble finding students who were interested. Several other teams have come and gone in that school district.

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

The fact that FRC is hard is part of the point. It wouldn't be the same competition if it were easy to run a team but that does come with a cost.

It probably becomes prohibitively difficult if the majority of the people involved in running a team (teachers, school administration, mentors, students and parents) have had no prior experience with smaller scale robotics competitions such as FLL, FTC or VEX. One could use the analogy of competing in FRC is like running in a full marathon. One typically works up to it by starting with 5k runs, etc. Of the three teams FRC my sons have been on that are/were struggling, none of the other people involved had any prior experience with any other robotics competitions. Unfortunately, not knowing what they don't know, they did not make good use of resources made available by more experienced teams such as Spectrum and the mentors did not ask to be mentored themselves. The team my son is with now has a strong presence in VEX and VEX iQ. They get much better results in terms of tournament results and, most importantly, the amount of learning that students experience.