I mentored a Chicago South Side school for four FRC competitions. During the last two two years I was trying to persuade them not to join. This year they didn't

I mentored a Chicago South Side school for four FRC competitions. During the last two two years I was trying to persuade them not to join. This year they didn't participate, but not because of my wisdom, the physics teacher who was driving it left the school. Participating in FRC has many benefits, which has been discussed and pushed at great length. What's not usually discussed is the huge opportunity cost, especially for poorer schools with severely limited resources, like the school I mentored at. Here are a few observations from four years of FRC mentoring with Team 1850: 1) MONEY. Participation is $5k. To this, add the extra money teachers get for their mentorship, travel costs to the competition, pizza, etc. for the kids during the days of competition. For our school I think this added up to approximately $10k conservatively. For larger teams, the cost could be many times this amount. 2) TIME. Due to the very tight schedule (why the schedule is so tight is a whole another discussion) the teachers who oversee team development have to relentless focus on pushing the build further, rather than teach kids good practices, foster teamworks, etc. At our school a typical season was meeting for 1-1.5 hrs off season (~September - December) then 3-4 hours during the day plus 6-7 hours on Saturdays during build season. Adding in the competition, conservatively that is 70-80 hours of team time. Our team was about 10 regulars (a small team, good teams, e.g. 101 Wildstang has more than 50 students actively working). That's conservatively 700-800 hours of student time alone. Adding teacher time (2 teachers generally present), this was near 1000 hours for one season. 3) MENTOR TIME. For schools like the one I worked with mentors are a very precious resource, because no one wants to drive from the city or suburbs 45mins to the school on Saturdays. That's why almost all good FRC Teams I observed are in from the suburbs. Again due to the cut throat schedule, I wasn't able to interact much with the students but just worked on the C++ code. Now, you have to ask yourself if the the benefits from FRC, which are substantial, are worth the immense costs associated with it, or if these can be diverted to other efforts instead. For example, I had the school but 10 rPis and started to teach kids programming using Python and pygame, they loved it! Unfortunately, most of the students that came were also on the robotics team so we had to stop when FRC work started. Our team didn't make it to the finals in the 4 years I mentored. The cause was the same: A poorly designed hardware component failing. Pitted against us were teams that had retired aerospace and mechanical engineers from Boeing and other such companies who developed their designs using CAD and sometimes tested their designs using their old company resources. We had NO CHANCE! This was the "torture of hope": each year we started with great motivation and told the students that if they worked hard they can get a good standing, where in reality they had nearly zero chance of that happening.