Hello everyone! I am currently doing something in one of my classes that makes us ask ourselves a burning question. This survey is made to better figure out the question: How does funding within NE high school robotics teams correlate to the treatment of people of color and the amount of people of color who end up pursuing STEM career paths after graduation?
This is to get a better understanding on how people within the FIRST community feel and to learn how we can grow as a community! I hope to get the perspectives of everyone in FIRST and think it’ll be a great way to see how everyone sees things. The survey should only take around five minutes or less. Thank you
I was a student on a team in 2012, and have been a mentor from 2015-present. I can answer most of the questions remembering back to when I was a student, but I notice that your survey doesn’t have any kind of question about how long ago these experiences were, which might affect your results.
I’m also thinking that you’re going to get a lot of “maybes” on question 9 - for many or even most people it depends on how much the fee is. Fees for robotics teams commonly range from “$20 for the team shirt but everything else is free” to “$500 per student, plus $1-3k for travel, plus merch, plus you’re on your own for lunch and dinner 5+ times a week, ++++…”. I was on a fee-free team - I don’t think my family paid a dime, even meals were paid for by the team - and I would have joined if the fee was less than $200 or so, wouldn’t have been able to if it was more.
I never really took those factors into consideration, so thank you so much for your feedback!! This is the first survey I’ve made like this, so I wasn’t sure what I should’ve added. Going into it in the future I’ll definitely try to make things like that more prominent in my survey
Thank you for letting me know!!