Sustainability in FIRST Programs

FIRST General Forum
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Though I’m admittedly pretty new to FIRST (less than four years), I’ve noticed a startling trend. Though older and sustainable teams tend to speak greatly about starting new teams, at all levels, there’s very little effort done to sustain teams in the competition, especially in FRC. Once FRC teams pass their rookie or 2nd year, without knowledge to sustainably get grants, they often die out, as indicated by a mode # of seasons participated in being 1 year.

How can we, as a community, either fix the problem, or ask FIRST what to make strides to?

For example, in MAR we’ve been on a slow decline since 2 years after the move to districts (2015), despite having new teams, and for 2018, I know that 2-3 teams will not be returning to FRC.

Whereas in Michigan, where there is a large amount of state-government support (in my opinion) has continued to encourage growth at a rate unparalleled by any other district or region. (grey line)

However, not every state can offer the same level of unilateral support that FiM receives, nor may it be plausible to expect it. The financial and institutional support needed to sustain an FRC team continues to increase, while rookies may remain unaware of resources like Chief, TBA, Ri3D and others.

My minor suggestion; make the Chairmans Award place sustainability at an equal value to starting new teams. This way, those teams with the manpower to start new teams can focus on keeping other teams alive, not only preventing a loss of cultural or team history, but also enabling stronger inter-team cooperation, sharing the resources they’ve found helpful, and overall raising the bar in terms of quality of team play and experience.

I’m very open to comments and criticism on this admittedly half-baked idea, but what do y’all think? How can we collectively improve sustainability?

Note: All data was composed from The Blue Alliance’s API or from The Orange Alliance’s web data. I’d do historical for TOA, but they only have the current season’s data, so years participated in is an unknown factor as of the moment.

District Growth Images taken from Jon Stratis’ Paper here.

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Waits for Jim Zondag

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Michigan does a good job of providing financial support, which is one thing that keeps teams from folding. Michigan could do a much better job of supporting teams holistically, because the existence of a team does not mean it’s doing its job effectively (although in most cases it’s better than the alternative of not existing).

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… Minnesota does a phenomenal job with team retention.

Basel’s comment definitely applies to any discussion about sustainability since retention != sustainability.

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I thought those pictures looked familiar :slight_smile:

There are a number of reasons teams might fold at any point. Off the top of my head, I would guess the 4 biggest areas are:

  • Financial support
  • Mentor support
  • School support
  • Student interest

I’ve known teams that folded because they lost their primary sponsorship and couldn’t afford to keep doing FRC. I’ve known teams that lost a lead mentor and couldn’t replace them. I’ve known teams that folded because the school decided to go in a different direction for STEM inspiration. And I’ve known teams that folded when their student numbers dropped to a point that they just couldn’t compete anymore.

All of these problems have different solutions, but all of those solutions can be made available to teams through an improvement of the local FRC community. Teams talking frequently, working together, and helping each other to overcome obstacles makes the entire burden of running a team much easier. Here in MN, we have a number of Hubs/Alliances/Coalitions/Conferences that serve that purpose. They’re all made up of teams geographically near each other, and those teams meet regularly to help each other. Some of them have even formed 501c3’s to support all member teams, providing direct financial support to everyone.

I would encourage everyone here to reach out to their other local teams and form some sort of hub to help each other. It’ll make every team stronger!

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Money does not solve all problems. Although absence of money certainly creates plenty of them. If some combination of FIRST/NASA grants covered not two years but three or four… For instance a FIRST grant that was, by year, 4K,3K,2K,1K would “cost” an extra 4K. How many teams would rally and soldier on? The ones that were going to disband for the other reasons would do so anyway so the cost to somebody would actually be less than 4K.

On a side note…we are working to line up a meeting with a company that is very, very big into making furniture for the tech side of the education world. Charging stations for ipads and Chromebooks, that sort of thing. FIRST intrigues them…

I am considering a pitch. Back when we were rookies our tournament pit was pretty much non existent. What if we work with these folks and cook up a FIRST Pit build? Something that would suit the space constraints etc.

Then…provide each rookie team with a “Pit of Parts” that they could have. Sponsor name of course right there prominently placed.

Thoughts?

Tim Wolter
Team 5826

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No way! Everyone should keep a singleminded focus on program growth!

In addition to keeping the emphasis of various FRC culture awards about how well teams have “spread the message of FIRST” by starting teams,

  • RDs and Senior Mentors should encourage high degrees of churn in the FRC community. Their job performance metrics should be tied to the number of new teams they help create, and they should not have any meaningful accountability for teams that fail in their service areas.
  • FIRST-sponsored funding opportunities should go exclusively to rookies and second-year teams, even if they do not have a good understanding of the resources required or a plan for sustained funding beyond their initial startup.
  • The FIRST STEM Equity Grant should reward big efforts based on how well those efforts “expand access to STEM” as measured primarily by the number of new FIRST teams started.
  • FIRST should develop and enforce events standards that require big-budget expenditures to maintain the spectacle for high-profile visitors.
  • FIRST shouldn’t conduct organized interviews of struggling teams to better understand the local effects on their sustainability, identify and rank the risk factors for team failure, and identify other teams that exhibit those risk factors for potential intervention.
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/s

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A big factor in addressing sustainability is ensuring that regional(s) in a particular area continue to exist.
Personally in our area, we want to ensure the Hawaii regional continues even though there are talks that the support and sponsorship to host the event has been less and less over the years.
If the Hawaii regional ever goes away, say goodbye to 90+% of the teams in our State. Without an end goal, you wont continue to build that pipeline from K-12.

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hey nate, i hate to burst your bubble on such a good idea but im pretty sure all of these things already happen

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The teams can help to make this change. It’s a harder sell to make because the award isn’t geared for it but it can be done. We’re evidence of that. It has and will hopefully continue to form the basis of our chairman’s presentation. It’s why we started the TIGER program and it’s something we believe in.

We won chairman’s last year at a district event without having ever created a single team. That doesn’t mean we haven’t helped to grow the FIRST NC program though and continue to help grow it.

Don’t wait for FIRST to make this change, make it yourself.*

*and I’d argue that it needs to be a greater value than starting new teams but that’s me

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salt

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This is true for any area, districts and regions can always provide better support, but quantifying that is much more difficult, resulting in my data being strictly boolean (did they compete, yes or no).

That’s absolutely amazing marshall, I remember seeing that post a few weeks back. However, the saying “action rolls down hill” seems to ring true here. Teams tend to do what is encouraged of them, especially all the way from the top. That’s the precise reason I suggested changing the award’s ‘description’ from the team’s perspective. Because the FIRST website describes it as:

and not

The Chairman’s Award is the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best spreads STEM, growing as many teams in the 5 year period as possible.

it’s perfectly valid for teams to make strides to implement it. However, it must be done collectively for the point to be made.

And as to Nate’s comment… I’ve seen less salts in a salt flat. Thank you for validating my gut feeling I was hoping was very wrong though.

The point of this post wasn’t go to “money is the only reason teams fail”, the point was to go “perhaps we’re not setting teams up to succeed without outside interference. We can’t fix the cause, so let’s set up outside interference to prevent massive failure until we can fix or even find the real cause.” Thank you everyone so far for the positive feedback.

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My bad. Try these instead.

  • Make it a little more difficult for teams to build a cohesive local peer community where help is offered and resources are shared-- do not replace the eliminated TIMS functionality which allowed team leaders to find contact information for neighboring teams.
  • Culturally undermine the program’s core strength of enabling the creation of real working collaborative-learning relationships between students and professionals-- in some regions, give implicit endorsement of celebrations of “white glove” teams who eschew the participation of mentors as active team members.
  • Don’t actively encourage unsustainable FRC teams to pause, step (even temporarily) into lower-cost FIRST programs, or even move away from FIRST or competitive robotics altogether, even if those approaches may result in better outcomes for the students in those programs.
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I agree with the chairman’s suggestion. So much of Chairman’s efforts seems to be centered around “expansion” (FLL, outreach etc), and not about sustainability.

Helping other teams is the main focus of Celt-X’s chairman’s work. We’ve been working with other Hamilton area teams and the school board to build a shared shop (now with CNC tooling!) and practice field called the Robodrome. To date we’ve had a dozen teams use our facility. My vision, once the Robodrome is built-out, is that new teams won’t have to procure their own workspace and tools, and with more mentors around it’ll be easier to collaborate on design and planning.

Shared resources are not enough to guarantee teams stick around, but it’s helpful I think. My team mused about creating an “coopertition-outside-of-competition” award to encourage it further.

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Here in MN, we’ve taking this down to a more local level this summer, trying to replace some of that functionality with resources on our website. http://mnfirst.org/index.php/frc-community-organizations/

It’s not complete (so many of the community organizations in the state are spread through word of mouth, we’re still trying to find them all!), and it’s opt-in for each organization.

Sustainability isn’t going to come from HQ, it’s going to come from local organizations. Local help, local resources to talk with that know and understand the local environment are going to be so much more valuable for teams.

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I think, as has been touched on in this thread, “sustainability” is a many-multifaceted problem. Some aspects of that problem lie squarely in FIRST’s court (poor FRC control system cohesiveness, poor FRC curriculum, order-of-magnitude higher registration costs, etc etc), while many aspects absolutely do not (as you touched on) and some are a mix of both.

Will sustainability come from HQ? Yes and no. Regardless of where “it” comes from, we as a community need to be focused on what we can do (as you aptly mentioned), and hope/work with FIRST to do what they can on their part (better rookie retention, less “growth for the sake of growth” mentality, etc)

This is definitely not a black and white situation, as with most things in life.

-Mike

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We have focused a lot on sustainability and have made it a big factor in our Big Bacon Theory of Image and Marketing workshop. The attrition rate of FRC teams is very high compared to what it should be. It’s extremely concerning that we have such a hard time keeping teams, and I think a lot of it comes from holding onto the money.

FIRST offers so many opportunities for rookie teams and second year teams, and then they are left out to dry. We are trying to help combat this issue but it is a huge uphill battle, and there’s only so much that FIRST can do, it’s a huge problem that everyone with experience can help pitch in on.

The best way to get the most students the FIRST experience is to create sustainable teams that can give any students in an area a good FIRST experience for a long time. It’s a worthwhile investment, but it is a lot of work.

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Hello Tim,

I’d like to bring up that our Chairman’s theme this year was “Systems of Sustainability.” We set out to create comprehensive guides for the FRC community called the “FRC Survival Guide.” This document includes everything from screwdrivers to talking to judges at competition. This was accompanied by an FTC survival guide with similar information. These projects combined with our long history of sub-programs led us to the thesis of KING TeC being a system of STEM education sustainability in our district, and robotics community. This idea earned us the Central Illinois Chairman’s Award, and one of three St. Louis World Chairman’s Finalists. All documents concerning our Chairman’s run this year can be found here on the KING TeC website.

Being one of the 132 active teams with 11 seasons played makes us old by Minnesota standards, because from very early on we made it our priority to keep KING TeC going. We won our first Chairman’s Award in our 3rd season by starting an entire robotics middle school program from scratch in our district. Today, KING TeC’s K-12 programs are made up of 292 students, 12 mentors, a booster club, and an abundance of helpful parents.

Sustainability is difficult. We went deep as early as we could, and it paid off. I see everyone playing a part. Teams will help each other improve, FIRST HQ will offer some resources, and sponsorship will stay important.

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TJF - This topic has been discussed directly and indirectly often here on CD. I’m glad you are motivated to not give up on it.

Are you motivated enough to dig through the last N years of CD wisdom, and summarize it for us?

What are the perennial sustainability-improvement ideas suggested?
What are the standard counter-arguments?

What ideas have been tried, and what was the result?

Let’s build on the existing discussion-foundation instead of expending our best energies just getting the discussion back to the point where it fizzled out the last time(s)!

Blake