After endless hours of reading my Popular Science Subscription on Google Reader, I stumbled upon this very interesting article:
Apparently, "DARPA will contract multiple organizations to deploy a variety of programmable manufacturing equipment, such as 3D printers, to high schools throughout the country and orchestrate a series of prize-based challenges to encourage competition and collaboration within high school teams as they design and build cyber-electro-mechanical systems." This program will be through FIRST!!
:eek:
WOAH! This program is called MENTOR, which stands for Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach. Basically, ten schools will be able to participate in this program in the two years, 100 schools in three years, and 1000 schools in 4 years. Just read the article for more information.
This will give massive opportunities to thousands of students, and will help our country in the long run.
Cool find and nice post. Where are you reading that this will be a collaboration with FIRST? The Pop Sci article has a FRC robot image and the following quote but I am not reading that this will be connected or part of FIRST.
“Taking a cue from the FIRST Robotics Competition, DARPA is offering prize-based challenges to inspire high school students to design new robots. FIRST”
Good call! I don’t know if I read this wrong or what. I guess the picture got me excited. Or my lack of sleep made me read things I did not actually read.
But I am sure that schools with robotics teams will be able to participate in this program also.
While it may not be a collaboration with FIRST robotics, this may definitely become another competition for FIRST teams to participate in. Great find, I’ll share this with my team and see what they think.
Our team attempted to get involved with this. Unless we are very badly mistaken, registration for this program ended early October and there was a briefing a couple Thursdays ago on what exactly was going on with it. All of us are very confused and the briefing didn’t help at all since it was during school hours and we missed the first part of it where they explained what was going on.
As for the connection with FIRST, I believe that there was somebody high up in this program who used to be involved with FIRST. Paul Eremenko, perhaps?
As you can see, I’m very hazy on the details of the program and am about as in the dark as everyone else in terms of what they have planned. However, I’m very excited to see what will happen with it. As far as we can tell, there’s no costs involved and maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a 3d printer in the mail!
Robomom, you’re not kidding. Government proposals are a nightmare.
So I’m a bit unclear, are they just requesting proposals for the development of the program? Or, did some lucky fool win the contract and now they are deploying the program…and hopefully the equipment?
Mentors from Team 379 have been working with a management team that is developing a proposal for MENTOR. This program is still in the developmental stage and has no connection with FIRST. I believe the proposal deadline is near.
The proposal we are working on seeks to leverage a number of existing programs and organizations that share MENTOR’s vision to engage high school students and to realize advanced manufacturing.
I am sure other groups/individuals are developing proposals as well.
I will be attending a meeting today at noon and will have more information come tomorrow.
