View Single Post
  #84   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 26-02-2012, 12:12
johnmaguire2013's Avatar
johnmaguire2013 johnmaguire2013 is offline
Harps On Websites
AKA: John Maguire
FRC #3322 (Eagle Imperium)
Team Role: Webmaster
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
Rookie Year: 2011
Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Posts: 74
johnmaguire2013 is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: Mentors on the team

Quote:
Originally Posted by wireties View Post
My company has a "2 hour rule" - if you spend more than 2 hours working on the same problem w/o progress you must take a break, consult a colleague, do something different to break the impasse. This is good advice on a robotics team with only 6 weeks to build the robot.

It is frustrating, unproductive and a poor learning experience to "exhaust all possibilities" before consulting a mentor. Most people learn using 2 of these 3 methods: reading, hearing, seeing/doing/experiencing. It is a rare student (of any kind) who can simply read about building a robot and go do it. Mentors can tell a student how to perform a task (thus the student hears it) or show them how to perform a task (thus the student sees it). Mentors make impossible tasks (for a typical isolated high school student) possible withing a 6-week window.
Yes, however many students have been on the team for four years, and pass the information downwards. The students effectively mentor themselves.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dsirovica View Post
It would be really cool and powerful, if there were a mechanism to purify and grow knowledge using crowdsourcing. Kind of like a wikipedia for FIRST.
As in the FIRSTwiki?

Last edited by johnmaguire2013 : 26-02-2012 at 12:15.
Reply With Quote