I want to start by welcoming everyone back to the spring semester.  I hope that everyone has a great remainder of the school year.  This fall saw another productive year for the organization.  We hosted a new combined format for the ITEC conference that allowed TEAI and the IDEA to offer two days of more hands on activities for educators.  We hope that you had a chance to attend and enjoyed the new format.  If you have any feedback, please let us know as we are always working on providing the best opportunities for our members.

This spring we will again be hosting the annual regional and state competitions.  The regional competition sites are listed under the competition tab then the teachers’ section.  We have been actively working to keep this map up to date and maintain relationships with our community colleges to be able to offer these competitions.  Please thank your regional competition director for all the hard work they put in to make these competitions possible as they volunteer their time to give you this opportunity.  If you are in an area that is not served by a regional on that map please contact Steve Skorup who is our competition director and we can try to work with someone in your area to start a regional site.  All of the registration forms have gone online a few years back and continue to work well to streamline the registration process.  The competition registration form is under Item number 1 on the teacher section of the site.  Please remember that all competition registrations are due by February 1^st and that we cannot accept late entries due to the logistics and scheduling of each regional facility.  Please remember that registration is $10 for each student competing and that you need to also pay your $40 educator dues as well.  The regional competitions all have different dates they are being offered within a three-week window of February 25^th-March 15^th.  Please check with your regional site to verify the date they have picked.  We also hope to add this information to our website as well. Also, do not forget about the two team competitions which are the architectural design and engineering design competition.  We started offering these about 3 years ago and they have continued to grow and are a good cumulative project for your students.  Depending on your regional, either the first place or both first and second place winners will advance to state in each category.  The state competition this year will be held on Saturday, April 27^th.  Good luck to all of your students and I hope that everyone enjoys this year’s competitions.

Brian Rick-President
President- IDEA