INFORMATION
Submitting an application accomplishes two purposes:a. It will present your school with the basic topics that you must address to assure a successful, positive experience. Regardless of whether you are selected for the grant, addressing these questions diligently will benefit you greatly in getting started in FIRST 2000 activities.
b. The selection committee will use your responses to see if you have done a diligent job of planning and to estimate your degree of commitment to execute your plan.
NASA Ames Research Center hosted 27 teams in 1999. We will use what we have learned to help your team to compete in this year's Western Regional. The national FIRST organization provides a wealth of information on their (http://www.usfirst.org) web site. We will also arrange for a webcast and/or video of the National Kickoff meeting in New Hampshire. It is highly desirable for an adult representative of your team to attend and bring the kit of parts home on the airplane. All of you should watch the webcast/video as soon as possible.
You are encouraged to complete the following application to the best of your ability and then to use it as the first draft of your actual working plan. Your answers to the following questions can be brief; this is not an essay. Just make sure that you have really thought about each topic and have worked out a good estimate of how you plan to deal with the underlying problem and its solution. Many of the questions will require that you do some phone-calling to industry, have meetings with parents, request school commitment, read the US FIRST web site carefully, and form an initial team to help complete and return the application.
APPLICATION
(Your application is comprised of answers to the following questions).
1. What are your goals and objectives?
Be as specific and realistic as possible; e.g. build a robot that is able to compete in the Western Regional, provide a positive experience for any student who will dedicate him/herself to the team effort, learn how robots work, learn how to organize a project and work as a team, learn to complete difficult and fun hands-on tasks jointly with engineer volunteers, involve a diverse section of the student body.
2. Who is the lead teacher?
Provide the background and contact information for that teacher (address, phone, email, pager, and fax). You will need a committed teacher who will help organize the overall effort, communicate daily with the team, stay on top of the communications with FIRST and NASA, and assure that everyone is working within the written plan. The teacher needn't have engineering knowledge to be the lead.
3. How will your team be organized?
Describe your potential team size and how your effort will be organized; e.g. team captain, fundraising and public relations, travel and logistics, rules captain, design team, computer simulation, animation and video and communications.
4. Where will you get engineering support? Describe existing and/or planned support; e.g. business, parents, community, or university. You will need at least one engineering mentor who will work with the students several times a week and will be an integral part of the team. Usually, teams have about 3 mentors (mechanical, electrical, software, video reporting or other discipline) who work directly with the students.
5. What facilities will you use to build the robot?
You will need an accessible, dedicated workplace to build and test the robot. Define the place, the tools and the kind of access that you will have. Examples are school shop, parents'9 garage, or local business facilities. Be very careful about your choice because you will have to use this space extensively and have access to it at all hours of the day and night.
6. How will you obtain funding?
Describe your budget and how you expect to meet it. You will need funds for registration, parts, tools and travel to the contest, among other things.
7. What is your schedule?
After the Kickoff, you will be able to develop a very specific working plan but you need to identify critical milestones from now throughout the competition. You will need to estimate how you will organize your week by having standard times for organizational meetings and shop work. Review the US FIRST web site (http://www.usfirst.org), especially the section on how to start and manage a team, provided by the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), or look at their web site (http://www.asme.org)
8. What is your level of commitment?
Describe the commitment of your teacher, principal, team captain, identified engineer, etc. Have these critical people clearly stated that they will support this FIRST 2000 activity, even if NASA cannot underwrite the registration fee? How many students have already expressed a desire to participate?
9. What other pertinent information would you like us to consider? No answer is required. Any answer must be short.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs your help to keep track of some statistics to measure the performance of this effort. Grant recipients will be asked to send us the following information two weeks after the Robotics Competition. Please make sure you keep track of these numbers as you successfully form your teams.
1A - Total number of students in school
1B - Total number of students on robotics team
2A - Average GPA of school (note scale, such as 4.0 or 5.0 scale)
2B - Average GPA of students on robotics team
3A - Average attendance of school % of days attended
3B - Average attendance of robotics team members
Other information we need:
School Mailing Address
Phone
Fax
E-mail
Is this the first year in the competition for your school?
If no, what was your team number?
Have you applied to any other NASA-sponsored Regional?
Number of scientists and/or engineer on the team.
Number of technicians on the team.
Number of engineering students on the team.
Number of other adult mentors.
Estimated number of students on the team.
Estimated contributions from sponsors other than NASA.
Access to machine shop, weld shop, wood shop, computers or drafting equipment, and to Multimedia Lab?