Re: Responsibilities of a Mentor
 

The main role of the mentors on our team is to give as much edumication to the students as possible! The team members are all basically taught how to be engineers; managing projects, working out schedules, designing, revising, testing, working as a team, testing again... This is basically just a place where high school kids can learn how to solve problems properly, and it's the job of the mentors to teach them how to do that.

Who built the robot is not really important, as long as the team members all got a good dose of the engineering process.

I think that our team ran very smoothly this past year; the mentors taught a bunch, the students learned a bunch, and everyone worked together to complete a challenging problem. ...And afterwards, there is a distinct advancement in everyone's ability to solve these types of problems. It's fun to compare robots built by students when they first came into the club to some of the designs they come up with now... the improvements are incredible!

Re: Responsibilities of a Mentor
 

Joe, Jane and others,
Thanks for the nice posts and a good reminder to bring everyone back to the topic of this thread. "Responsibilities of a mentor" And please remember to bring your GP when writing.

As to engineer discussions, please use the other linked threads for those discussions.
Thank You.

Re: Responsibilities of a Mentor
 

First, thanks again to everyone who has posted on topic. I find it very gratifying to see so many people in FIRST who take mentoring so seriously. I also find it very reassuring to see that so many people seem to agree on what a mentor is responsible for. For all of the arguements of engineer-built robots and student initiative, it's a good thing for FIRST that most of us are working toward the same goal.
Again, thank you to everyone who posted here in answer to my questions.