[boomergeek]

I would suggest you talk to your mentor. You might also try to encourage more students to beg their parents and other teachers to help mentor.

I think many teams end up with a 4 year plan for progression of students in different areas. In the mechanical area, it usually starts with measuring, weighing, cutting, sorting, etc. Good designing takes substantially more knowledge and experience. Can you imagine a biology students first use of a scalpel being on a live patient? With 6 weeks of a schedule, your robot is almost equivalent to a live patient. Those students that have demonstrated competence through either testing or through experience should be making most of the decisions.

For everyone, but especially rookies, I would suggest that they need to watch several hours of video of past matches to get a realistic concept of what robots can do before they ever get a "vote" on how this year's robot will be designed.
If a person can't watch and understand what make past robots and robot drivers good, then it's hard to believe they can come up with a competitive design.

The "everybody's on the team, so everybody should have equal say on the design" is not how real engineering in real companies works.

Multivoting that weighs rookies votes too significantly is likely to run into dead ends. Could you imagine an engineering company assigning major aspects of their only design project for the year to relatively disinterested brand new part-time engineers?

At the same time, rookies need to contribute, learn and grow- it's always a balancing act of the mentors and more experienced students taking significant and valuable time teaching the less experienced.

Many experienced people work well by themselves but have yet to develop the forethought in helping less experienced people to be productive.

There are lots of coaching suggestions available.

My advice: set realistic goals. Decide what is most important: It is probably not winning. It is probably to show progress and to get more students that learned and contributed to come back next year. So letting others have ownership and allowing them to make some very significant mistakes may sometimes be the only way to accomplish that.