[nahstobor]

All I can say is that I'm deeply sorry to hear this. The worst thing to read in this post is that the high-school students are the ones getting attacked. If someone wants to say a robot is "mentor built" go after the mentors [Insert I'm a man, I'm 40 rant].

I feel a lot of the time people forget in the heat of battle that these are high school students who are trying to get inspired about engineering. Claiming that a group of students hard work isn't there own might be enough in some cases to lead them away from engineering.

In 2009, as the coach, my human player committed a penalty at championship. While I was getting chewed out by our alliance partners coach after the match, I stopped him and simply thanked him for coming after me and not freshman who made the mistake. It allowed me to calm the student down, have a laugh with him, then go to the practice field and work with him 1 on 1 to make sure the penalty wouldn't happen again.

I'm not going to lie, as a mentor, I advise my students not to get the robot painted. It usually ends up that we don't have enough time, but the advice is out of protection for the students. Once you have a professional looking machine, the "mentor built " card comes out.