Do people from your school (non-robotics members) come to support your team at regional competitions? I was very disappointed when one of my teachers asked the class whether anybody wanted to skip school and go to the competition to cheer us on. Nobody wanted to go, and I know this is true for several other classes. True, the day they would have missed was a half day, so they would have ended getting out later, but i still think it is pitiful.
Sometimes we will have people from administration come cheer us on, on the saturday portion of regionals…it seems like we attract more of a crowd during post season.
God our school loves us. they give us soo much money and we just got $40,000 worth of new shop eq. Keep in mind we are just a rural public school.we get admin and and alot of non robot people to come but after a while the non robot folks become robot folks.
I wish our school had that kind of resources. Right now budget cuts in Mass. are targeted towards extracuricular activites. Oh well, eventually things will get better.
Wow, that truly is unbelievable. Our school does give us support, but not that much financially. We got two robotics rooms specifically for us, and a bit of money from the district and administration. The principal loves the robotics program, and does everything she can to help us. I am very concerned with the fact that nobody at our school even knows we have a robotics program, despite the fact that we are quite well publicized. Even if they do know, they don’t care because we are just a bunch of computer geeks to them.
Since our team has no official school support (15 schools this year and 3 home schoolers) this option of a field trip to robotics comp would be allowed in my former high school. However, my gifted class teacher always took a personal day to watch the Drexel competition and even dropped by nats. Our students do love the assemblies we hold every year for the entire school.
Our school hates the Robomasters.
We JUST got approved to travel to Texas. We weren’t even going to think about going there, until a “leap of faith” came along, and rescued us, and we FINALLY got our permission slips!
Now, they don’t give us any money either. THEY TAKE IT AWAY, for use on other unknown items… which I don’t know of.
See you in Texas (FINALLY!!! YAY!!!)
Not very many people from our school do. In fact, when robotics first started, no one knew there was such a thing! As far as I know though, only students who know about robotics and students who take CAD, Mechanical Drafting, CAD Engineering, or any other teacher who has experience in robotics really support us. Sure there are announcements posted about robotics but no one really notices them that much.
We managed to convince several students and teachers to come watch us at San Jose, and they even participated in the swing dancing thing! 
but our SCHOOL is another matter… they don’t give us money, in fact, they took away some $5000 this year. AND they make us use them as a sponsor, or else they threatened to take away our advisors and any semblance of on-campus work areas, plus, they have to regulate everything we do to protect their “public image” (website, etc)
Surprisingly, we actually got our principal to come to Great Lakes. We’ve only been asking the guy for 6 years now…
As far as support, though, most of the school knows we exist, and that we do well, but nobody really knows much of anything about what we actually do. Monetarily, we get a whole $0 from our school. All funding is corporate or student-raised.
We are just robotics members. I also think that ive heard that next year, we will be getting very little if any thing from our school. And, this is our last year with our main sponsor. (There goes $5k and an engineer.)
We don’t have much support either. We’re a relatively small team with a core group for construction, programming, electronics and so on of about 10 ppl. We have a few more ppl like darren (nice website, www.mcirobotics.org), but not much else. Although our principal is very supportive and helped facilituate the trip to houston, we are, in the eyes of everyone else just another club at our school (partly becuase there is little interest). For the most part, the team is run and maintained by students; hence the 100% student built robot.
We also don’t have alot of money, probobly because we only have 4 sponsors (TDSB, NSK, Wardrop and Thompson Terminals). Our school gave us $1000 (probobly enough to buy a burger in the states, lol j/k) which is the most that any club got.
We were very suprized to hear that we have qualified for the finals because we had never expected to go to them, the cost were out of the question. But, as it turns out, its not too bad as we are now only paing a few hundred Canadian dollars for 4 nights at Hyatt along with a bus ride.
Just out of curiousity to school who get a large amount of financial sponsership from various firms; do you guys find that the more the sponsor gives, the great control it has over your team with respect to the involvement of sponsors? (ie. we gave you $50,000 and we want a good robot so build this and this according to these plans?)
When I joined the team my sophomore year, I was the only girl (out of three schools). Now, two years later, we have 14 girls on the team. The hardest part each year is recruiting new members! Unfortunately, it seems that everyone at my school thinks that robotics is a nerd convention, so even the kids who say they’re interested in engineering won’t give it a thought.
When I asked for a leave of absence form my sophomore year, I was actually laughed at by one of the dean of my school, who didn’t think I should be allowed to have unexcused absences for the Regional competition.
Despite all of this, our team has finished done very well, and we have recruited some very committed members. To anyone else who has experienced the same things…stay with it. FIRST is not only fun, it’s an incredible learning experience that will put you years head of everyone else.
We’ve only got 12 kids on our team, two engineers (who weren’t able to come to competition with us), and me.
So although it’s our rookie year, we’re hoping to get other teams to cheer with us at IRI and hopefully we’ll get some more school support. Hopefully…:rolleyes:
*Originally posted by Nick Mac *
**Sometimes we will have people from administration come cheer us on, on the saturday portion of regionals…it seems like we attract more of a crowd during post season. **
that’s the case for us too.