According to this story which was covered by reddit not too long ago:

Current members of the first Portland area high school robotics club — chartered as “Team 1432” by FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) — ponder the club’s future as they sit with their only asset — last year’s robot — in the dank basement of an aging fraternal organization’s clubhouse

There is a high school in Oregon that is disbanding its robotics team on a technicality and pocketing the money that the team raised for its competition. I have nothing against football, but it strikes me as unfair that this would never happen to a football team.

This got me thinking that Football,a s an industry, is probably smaller than Robotics. And, indeed, I was pretty close. Both American Football and Robotics are about $6 billion businesses annually. In the next few years, toys and domestic service robots like the Roomba will likely reach about $6 billion., according to The Robot Report.

There is no reason to think that a person has a better chance of getting a job in football than in robotics. Now, to some people, football is entertaining. But shouldn’t school be a place where students are encouraged to do more than entertain themselves?

-Peter