Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/710139
68 SMT Magazine • August 2016 times augmented by sponsors themselves who would like to sponsor teams joining our pro- grams, and who fully support the development of the next generation of science and technol- ogy leaders. It's a win-win for everybody. It helps grow our program, it helps grow the people that are involved, but it really is creating this next gen- eration of people that the sponsors will need to work in their companies. Qualcomm, NASA, BAE Systems, Rockwell Collins, PTC, really are looking at future consumers, but more impor- tantly, future people that can push their tech- nology forward. Matties: Exactly. Are there any mentorships that come out of those sponsorships? Do they bring people in and work at that level? Johnson: Definitely. Interacting with FIRST is really a wonderful thing for sponsors because they can get involved at a bunch of different levels. To start, they can simply apply their em- ployees as volunteers. Wilker: At events, like one-day kind of events. Come in, get trained up and you interact with the kids in a very controlled, one-day commit- ment kind of experience. We have a lot of cor- porate teams that like to come in and they'll give me a dozen volunteers for the day and they come in as a group. Johnson: They can volunteer for a single day, as kind of a shallow dive. They can get their stu- Johnson: FIRST is headquartered and founded out of New Hampshire, but we are global. We have about 400,000 students annually partici- pating in our programs, with about 150,000 volunteers that make it all work. Jill and Mark Edelman run FIRST programs for Northern Cali- fornia. I am responsible for FIRST Tech Chal- lenges all over. We've got over 5,000 teams now in 18 different countries. The growth has been phenomenal. The big thing this year is the all new control system based on the Android operating system running on Android cell phones and tablets. That has allowed us to really make the program accessible to a whole range of students that otherwise might have been a little intimated by jumping into the robotics deep end. We're re- ally happy with the way that the platform is coming together. We worked with Qualcomm as our corporate sponsor partner to be able to develop this, and it's been really well accepted this year. Matties: The technology I'm seeing here on the show floor, the battle floor if you will, looks elabo- rate and expensive. How is all this being funded? Johnson: I can speak specifically for the FIRST Tech Challenge, but the way that our non-profit is built is through a combination of registration fees from teams and corporate sponsorships. Frankly, most of our budget is covered by team registration fees. Those registrations are often- INVESTING IN THE FUTURE OF OUR INDUSTRIES Jill Wilker and Ken Johnson