[RRLedford]

The mentor's role is different for every team situation. Not all teams are at a level where students can effectively take on all the responsibilities that must be handled to complete a successful build. I am in my third year mentoring a small team where most of the students have competing extra curricular activities.
We had no build sessions during finals week. We had much of team out of town for break the last four days of build.

We have no seniors and only six students that make most sessions. We have one capable electronics student and one capable programmer. I give these two students full control of those areas, and they need very little input from me. They get things done effectively on the required timeline. The rest of the team has to handle the design and mechanical assembly, but even on good days far too much energy gets wasted goofing around. On a good day for this group, serious focused effort & productivity is happening for maybe 50% of the 2-2.5 hours for our three weekday sessions a week. Attendance at our six hour Saturday sessions are barely 50% from other conflicts.

We consistently end up with a good design concept that is barely rushed to only partial assembly by deadline. No testing, No trouble shooting. No driving. No autonomous. We end up holding back critical unfinished systems to complete them. Then we have to finish building the robot in the pits, while barely making the inspection deadline. We have no practice scrimmages, since we barely pass inspection in time, as we resolve problems.

So, do I take a hands off approach and let them fail miserably? Or, do I pitch in with the build enough so that they can see enough results at competition to consider that the season was an overall success. The father of the student in charge of electronics also mentors, and he wants her to do well at competition. So, he also helps with the build and design considerations. We both would rather do less building and more mentoring, but that would result in a robot that would leave most students thinking, at the end of competition, that the season was an exercise in futility and waste of their time. The program would spiral down and be discontinued in a year or two, which happened previously, if we did not help build the bot.

We two mentors feel obligated to both the school's robotics program, and especially to those students who pour the greatest amount of their time and energy into the season's build effort, to ensure that some minimal level of robot performance is accomplished by the time competition arrives. If this means we have to help with build more than we prefer, then so be it. As long as the students still feel like it is their robot, not the mentor's robot, and they are satisfied with how their season turns out, I am fine fit this approach. As I work to expand the team, and the maturity and skills of its members, I feel that this approach is essential for this stage of its development. I look forward to reaching the stage in our program where "mentors do not build", but right now, this philosophy will not be helpful.

-Dick Ledford