Its another year of FRC and the Texas FRC registration numbers continue to decline.
Current FRC Texas registration is around 104 teams, which is a significant drop from 132 in 2013.
Here’s a chart of Texas Registration Growth since 2003
http://2013.discobots.org/node/84
On the positive side, many other STEM programs are growing quickly in Texas. If anyone would like to discuss those statistics, I would be happy to provide a few numbers.
What is causing the loss of teams in Texas? It’s rather concerning, especially as FIRST pushes for growth. Is it that teams sign up, get a NASA grant (or some other kind of grant), and then a year or two later there’s no more grant, and they cease to exist any longer?
To keep this program sustainable, on a national and state level, we really need to work on funding at least the minimum annual budget requirements of FIRST teams through state and federal education funding sources for career technical education. Selling lightbulbs and getting corporate sponsorships is great, but it does not work in all areas and will not continue to work forever.
Hopefully someone can correct me if this is wrong. Wasn’t the spike in 2009 from JCPenney sponsoring a lot of teams?
What is the growth of other STEM programs?
Here’s the thread from last year that discusses the growth from 2009-2012:
The JCP spike is the 2011 season. At least, for most of the US. Unless they started sponsoring teams in Texas earlier.
I thought it due to the TWC program? They were promoting new teams in Texas for two years, correct?
FIRST and UIL/Texas are talking and the TEA is approving or starting to approve more robotics classes. In our district robotics classes and computer science classes can now count as math and science credits. For the FIRST (pun intended) time this year there is an official STEM track for a high school diploma. This is only a rumor but I think AP Computer Science 2 qualifies as a foreign language credit! Plus we now have a Cyber Patriot team and our sister high school (Rockwall-Heath High School, home of FRC 3310) won an International Rocketry Competition in 2013. This is all in the last few years.
The spike in growth was related to JCPenny and the TWC grants. The decline of team registrations is not as clear.
Many of these numbers include multiple sub-teams inside a single school.
**FTC in Texas : **
81 teams in 2009 season
300 teams in 2013 season
**VEX (VRC) in Texas: **
106 teams in 2009-2010 season
562 teams in 2013-2014 Season
Follow the money, Andy. A lot of teams were almost totally reliant on that funding. There’s a reason only 13 of the 50 2009 rookies are still around. Only two of us have WFFA winners, and only 2 or 3 have at least one regional victory. That was a rough year, before I got to Texas, and one that is often recalled as painful by the surviving participants.
Amazing growth there in the FTC/VEX teams. I believe more and more schools realize that FTC/VEX are more within reason than FRC for lots of schools.
Reasons that I see are
There has to be some other important factor here besides the JCP grants though. A whole bunch of MN teams were founded off of those grants back in 2010/2011 as well, but almost none of them have folded.
Here are the relevant documents I could dig up:
2010 (I think) JCP sponsored teams
2011 JCP sponsored teams
According to the second document, JCP sponsored 21 Rookie/2nd Year Teams in MN, and 28 in TX.
As of the 2014 competition season:
only 2/21 of these MN teams are inactive (3747 and 3524)
14/28 of these TX teams are inactive (3819, 3758, 3409, 3713, 3778, 3730, 3392, 3804, 3857, 3696, 3369, 3529, 3762, and 3869)
Perhaps it is not a useful analysis to compare MN to TX, since both regions seem to be outliers in terms of growth/sustainability (on opposite sides of the spectrum). I’m just curious as to why MN seems to be doing so well in this area, especially since there were no sustaining teams here prior to 2006.
Maybe since MN didn’t have very many other robotics programs in 2010-2011, the teams here didn’t really have the option to “drop down” to a less resource-intensive competition and thus were forced to stick through the sponsorship crunch? That seems silly, but I can’t come up with a better explanation.
Andy,
What is the geographic distribution of the lost teams? Larger cities? West Texas? I ask only because I don’t recall losing 2/3 of teams around the Austin area.
The biggest losses are definitely more rural or small city schools. I can put exact numbers on these with a little data crunching if people are interested.
Texas Regions that struggle.
It is not about TEA approval it is about district approval. The robotics classes have been on the books for four years under CTE. Districts are just now picking them up. Whether that is due to having qualified teachers on staff or because STEM is the current buzz word in education today is something each district has to answer separately.
CTE (Career and Technical Education) is under a standards review. All of our TEKs are being reviewed and rewritten. Yes, you/we, will be getting more STEM/robotics classes. The battle is getting the core subject areas and districts to recognize the value of STEM courses taught under CTE along with those taught under the math and science departments.
Thank you HB5 (House Bill 5) 
one of several things I really like about it but it only applies to current freshmen, students on the 4x4graduation plan (current sophomores - seniors) don’t get that ‘STEM’ endorsement opportunity…or any of the others for that matter.
Fact not fiction or rumor. It was approved by the Texas legislature and TEA in January. Here is the catch…that qualification expires in 2016. No one knows what’s going to happen after that. Also, I am not sure what the teacher certification requirements are in order for it to count. I can find out and let you know but I think the awarding of the FL credit for CompSci is largely up to the district not dictated by TEA.
The CTE Computer Programming course re-writers toyed with asking for their course to count as a foreign language credit, however; the concern became what certification/re-certification TEA would require of the instructors to be considered qualified to offer the foreign language credit.
Hope this helps some and if you are teaching AP CompSci (or your district is) you need to look into the Foreign language thing *now *before it expires so that when that comes up for review you can hopefully keep it.
3747 actually ended up combining with 3018 last year and now 3018 has switched over to FTC (at least last I heard).
We have a large corporate community in Minnesota that is absolutely awesome in keeping these teams running with the support of the RPC.
I have no problem at all with Minnesota taking over the Texas thread ! Texas has a lot to learn from the Minnesota model.
I don’t see a lot of details about how new teams are funded in Minnesota. What is the typical funding process for a rookie Minnesota team (i.e. 2 years of funding , connecting sponsors to teams) ?
What is the name of the Minnesota non-profit that raises funds from the corporate community ?
Just to give some idea of how large Texas is and the distance between teams.
This is data from the 2012 season based on team358.org stats.
Average distance between Michigan teams is roughly 112.902991346 miles
Average distance between Texas teams is roughly 244.666560144 miles
That’s a huge difference and a large problem. Even just driving to some of the teams we consider in Greater Houston can take well over an hour without traffic.
By no means is this the only reason for team loss, but it’s part of the problem. It’s very easy to be isolated in our state.
It’s not only the team-to-team distance, it’s also the team-to-sponsor distance. For teams in cities, these distances are small, but that’s not the case for many teams, even teams that are relatively close to population centers. There’s also the question of mentor support, which can be a problem even in the cities.
FRC 660 comes to mind. They were in Round Rock, the home of Dell, sponsored by BAE, a 2001 Rookie All Star, who suddenly stopped competing in 2010. Probably the departure of a key mentor, but I don’t know their story.
Also, there’s Reagan High School in Austin. They were FRC 4271, supported by JCP, and decided to move over to FTC. I’m still not sure why they didn’t get the support, but that’s a prime example of a grant beneficiary who dropped FRC because they couldn’t get mentor and industry support.
For example of a manageable distance to a major city, Bastrop is 25 or so miles from Austin. They have good community support, and they are able to sustain a team. From my understanding of their story, this is due in large part to industry located in Bastrop that supports the Austin economy coupled with several dedicated retired community members with technical background who help out.
On the flip side, Del Rio is fairly isolated. You are guaranteed to go through a Border Control checkpoint when leaving it on your way to, well, anywhere. But, they keep their program alive.
Other isolated places that don’t have industry or community support will need to rely on grants. That’s my earlier point: How many teams got the TWC or JCP grant (both were fairly easy to get as I understand), spawned up a program, but never got the mentor support to sustain the team (like the Reagan situation above)? Or, more recently, how many potential teams and sponsors have looked at events that feature FRC next to FTC or VEX and say “well, I can reach X times more kids with that smaller program” and go after that instead? FRC is a big game, and it can be intimidating. It fits some schools well, and others not so much. But until we can express to Texas teachers, mentors, and sponsors that the FRC game offers so much different a challenge than the challenge of FTC or VEX, we can expect those FRC numbers to keep dwindling.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the overall technology education programs are growing, as indicated by VEX and FTC growth. But, I don’t like the idea that the FRC team count is shrinking.
Oh, and this decline in new rookies might be part of a broader problem:
As far as I know, there is no regional grant process in Minnesota. Many teams are securing initial funding from national rookie grants and then later finding small local businesses to fill in costs or larger companies like 3M to support then in the long run. We also have some teams that are absolutely fantastic at finding sponsorships, like 1816, who are very willing to help other teams learn from their practices.
MN FIRST is the organization that secures funding for regionals in the state, but as far as I know they don’t fund teams.
We also have a relatively high amount of tech companies like 3M, Honeywell, Boston Scientific, PTC, and others who sponsor multiple teams long-term. An interesting fact in this regard is that while in many states health care or financial sector businesses represent the largest lobby, in Minnesota tech companies are the largest lobby at the state legislature. While we don’t get funding from the state level, recognition from the state government and initiatives like MNDRIVE, which fund robotics industry growth, raise awareness both in businesses and in the public mind about robotics, which (and I’m just guessing here), makes STEM program growth and funding appealing for schools and businesses. Combined with Minnesota being a significantly smaller state than Texas, where the majority of teams are clustered right next to the majority of tech businesses, and it’s a pretty good mixture for robotics growth.
A little bit of further conjecture, but I’d also say that Minnesota’s largest robotics program is FLL is also a contributing factor to funding and team sustainability-- there are over three times as many FLL teams as there are FRC teams, which means there’s a pretty large pool of students that already exist who are likely to be interested in programs down the line. Many teams will speak to the value of feeder programs, but I think that was and is a pretty important factor in the explosive growth and continuing sustainability of teams MN has experienced.
Hopefully this was at least vaguely useful. I’m sure Evan probably has a bit more to chime in.
I think one of the other factors in Minnesota is that FRC is recognized by the state athletic league as a team sport, just as football, basketball, dance line, etc. So the students are able to letter if their school chooses to do so. It also gives those teams that do not make it to world, a chance to participate in a state championship, just as other varsity teams in the state do.
Our rookie year was 2012 and funding is always an issue, our particular team does not receive any financial support from the school district nor much of any other support for that matter. We made a decision as mentors that even though the school district charges up to $200 for extra correcular participation fee ($25 for free or reduced lunch students) we would not charge it. We want the kids to be involved and did not think that money should hold them back. But, we are still here and even though we lost five seniors from a team of eight this past spring we have added more kids. Success!
Is there such an organization in Texas? This would be great. Combine a non-profit raising funds for young teams (and teaching them how to do it) with some kind of formal mentor outreach and one could make a big difference.
Also I think the UIL and FIRST are talking, perhaps some kind of 1-year pilot program is being discussed? If FRC/FTC/FLL become UIL approved more money will flow from the school districts (which will help recruit and retain teachers).