This is coming from a college student mentor / former FLL/FVC/FRC team member.
1.
Communication is key! You are lucky to have talented mentors that care about and support your team! If you want a more active role in ___ process, communicate that with the mentors, teachers, etc. If you sit in the corner and wish you were more involved, you will never become more involved. While mentors may be smart, we're not always psychic.
2. As a mentor, we need to look out for the overall health of the team. Depending on the student's interests (which vary from year to year), we may vary our involvement in particular subteams each year. If one year we have lots of student interest in X subgroup and not much in Y subgroup, we'll let the students do most of the X subgroup work and we'll take a much more active role in Y subgroup to make sure all the work gets done. Your teachers could have designed your robot because no students expressed an interest in being involved with the design process.
3. Most mentors are often more than willing to teach students and get them involved, but our hours of teaching are limited. Don't wait until the build season to want to learn how to do X, Y and Z. We have limited time, and can't dedicate 110% of our efforts onto multiple problems simultaneously. Sometimes, we make case-by-case decisions that it's better for the team to do X ourselves now and teach the students X in the off-season, than to teach them now.
4. For the future, organize your team into sub-teams and select student/mentor leaders for each sub-team. Team 228 has about a dozen different sub-teams, with each group having a student leader and a dedicated mentor. We give each of our sub-teams a fair amount of autonomy to pursue their goals. At the end of every meeting, we dedicate the last 10-15 minutes to everyone stopping all work/cleanup to listen to the lead student from each sub-team talk about their progress/problems encountered/future work.
We've found this works well, as people like being
given autonomy, it keeps the team updated as to the progress of sub-teams, and it helps the mentors focus their efforts on areas which are most needed.