Colleges and FIRST - a little help

[ErikJusten]

All-

I've got a few questions that I'm hoping you can help me with:

1) How many teams have a college affiliation (this I have a number for)? More importantly, what support does the college provide? Money? Machine shops? etc.

2) Of all the college teams (a few schools off the top of my head: WPI, Purdue, Ohio State, MIT, USCGA, MTU, etc), which of these stand out as "good teams?" By "good", include what they are good at: robot, working relationship with the HS students, creativity, etc.

We already sponsor a team, but I'm currently talking with our Dean to see if I can't get the college (and the university) involved more. So..... I need some more data than what I can just get from the program.

You can either post it here, or send me an email (justen.4@osu.edu).

Thanks,
Erik

[AdamT]

Team 401 *us* is sponsored by Virginia Tech...

Tech gives us a little money, but all of us mentors come from the college or from the county school system...

This year hasn't been a good year for us, but last year we were a dvisional finalist at Nats and finalists at VCU.

Team 825 *another us* is supposed to be sponsored by Radford University...

They weren't much help...

Other then a couple of teachers, I was their mentor.

[Deej]

WPI-The one and only sponosor of our team. Since the very beginning, they have been there for our team. The provide the resources (monetary, building space, machines, all extras) for the team. We have one faculty advisor on the team, and the rest is made of engineering students and high schoolers. All ideas come from the high school students, who then in turn work with the engineering students to design and build. The high school students get first hand experience with designing, and actually machine parts for the bot. No paid engineers, just college students volunteering their time to help inspire the high schoolers. The program is year round, we do off season competitions (7 this past year), as well as demos for area schools, churches, etc.....(we are well over 60 at this point, and we had 2 demos this week with last year's robot). We are mentors for other teams in the area when they first started up (I think theres about 6 or so that we helped start). The upper brass of our university is competely behind the organization, as they see what we do, and how we do it. There have been studies that relate of the incoming freshman classes as to how many were part of high school teams, and we've found that basically 1 in 5 incoming WPI students was part of a team in the past. We have representation of over 40 teams amoung out student body. I hope that this answers some of you questions, and if you need more info, feel free to ask.

[asher]

Team 31 is proudly sponsored by The University of Tulsa! The university provides us with money for construction, use of their machine shops, as well as a wonderful EE thats like our daddy. We also have undergraduate and graduate students that work along with our highschoolers (a ratio of about 1:1) and many times the college students end up learning from the highschoolers who have been on the team is years past. We have an awesome relationship with our university and if you'd like any more information on the program just ask.

[Anne Shade]

Team 832 is our second team. We fund everything but the high school student travel fees through the ME school and their contacts. Georgia Tech also provides us with machine shop use and building space. We are just beginning to grow our relationship with the university but we have already recruited people from about 15 teams from around the nation that now participate on our team. In the fall we hold training sessions for the high schools students as well as mini design competitions. The high school students come up with the design and we help them make that come about. If you have any more questions about our team, feel free to contact me at gte936m@prism.gatech.edu.

[Josh Hambright]

Team 461 is sponsored by Purdue Student Engineering Foundation and we have a great relationship. Much of our admisitrative stuff is overseen by members of PSEF but any students can be advisors. We have all college students that actualy run the team and we only have 5 actual adults that help with the team. Its a great relationship and some of our students have even gone on to become advisors for the team.

[HotWheels2002]

I'm also quite interested in this, as plans are now in the works for a University of Maryland FIRST team. Go Terps!

[ajlapp]

Michigan tech is the primary sponsor of team 857. The team is run by college students who are part of an Enterprise System. This is basically a really slick way for us to get sponsorship and run the team without extra college red tape. We more or less run the team like a company.
We are organized like a corporation and lobby sponsorship by promising research in return for money to run the FIRST Team.
The real important part for college students involved is that they get a senior design credit. This basically replaces an entire year or research with FIRST. It's quite an advantage over some other programs that you can take.
We have a machine shop that we share with other programs on campus.......but we can always get in when we need to. We have CNC capability and a water jet on campus, and if FIRST ever requires mining, we're pretty much set.
The team is also about 90% former high school FIRSTers. Our experience level is always high because everyone more or less knows what's coming down the pipe. The whole system seems to be coming together. So far this first year under the new system has gone fairly well. The organization has worked well, although we do get much more interest from the college students than from the local high schools.
The Upper Peninsula is like Mars compared to most of the country and it presents it's own unique problems. Hope this info helps. We love to answer questions too, so feel free to e-mail.

Anthony Lapp
Lead Engineer
team 221 --------> now 857