[mathking]

As a teacher, the key idea for me is partnership. The ideal should be engineers working in partnership with students. For every "100% done by the students" robot there is a "90% done by the engineers" robot. In both cases the participants (while often having a good time and learning things) are missing the greatest benefit of FIRST. The chance to learn from each other. I cringe when I read a post saying "We don't want engineers working on our robot." We love to have the engineers and students work side by side. It is not only educationally better, it is more fun. I cringe just as much when I see a group of engineers pushing all the kids away from a robot to fix it. For pretty much the same reason. Our goal each year is that by the end of the season, the kids (as a group) understand the robot well enough that they can diagnose and fix problems on their own. But we always hope they won't ever have to. (Sometimes when we go to the Championships we are very "mentor-lite").