Honestly, I am very surprised at the negative comments on this thread. The REC Foundation and VEX Robotics worked very hard to provide an exciting and challenging new program for both High School and University teams that wanted more flexibility to build multiple robots with custom parts and experiment with AI. This is the PILOT YEAR!!! We will learn and make adjustments after this first season. If you feel this program doesn’t have value for your organization, I get it. Don’t sign up. But we have a waiting list for organizations that do want to participate. This is not a failure just because not everyone on this forum agrees with how we are launching the PILOT program. Constructive feedback is always welcome but this is not some out of touch money grab and the RECF is not some incapable organization because we are trying to launch a new program without a sponsor in the middle of the pandemic.
The RECF is providing the same hardware bundle to all teams. We pre ordered the hardware to make sure all pilot teams had what is needed for this first season. The costs with shipping, operations, storage, etc is around $1300. The RECF is charging approximately $700 in registration fees: $200 towards IT / System costs to launch the new program and $500 to administrative costs for this first year. We have one staff person assigned to VAIC and we have to train RSMs to support EPs. This is a real cost. The RECF is also paying $500 per team to VEX for the VAIC software. The software took many man years to develop and I am very happy to pay VEX to use their software.
I met with multiple Universities in many countries to discuss the need for VAIC. The feedback I received is that we are providing a great learning opportunity at a very affordable price point. We opened this to High School teams because of the feedback that there are many high school students that will benefit from this opportunity. From our very first communication, we let all teams know the cost will be $2500. This is not a surprise price that we just dropped.
I hope this provides some clarity.
Regards,
Dan