[popnbrown]

It's a tough role to play as mentor. Especially, when you have previous work experience with other FIRST teams. I agree with Dan, every team is every team. While I don't agree that any team should have their robot built by a mentor. The amount of involvement I understand varies from team to team.

But at the end of the day, the only way students will learn and develop skills is by doing things. They can build WITH a mentor, and that means mentors can assist, but ultimately the robot and the team are the accomplishments or the failures of the students, and the skills students develop and things they learn, are the accomplishments or failures of the mentors.

So in my experience on 4096. There are mentors that step back completely in building, there are some mentors that work on theory with students then step back while they design, and there are mentors that are work with the students through theory and through the design. All our mentors typically do help when it comes to building, as in physically bolting and what not but I've seen that a lot of the mentors actually are instructed by students, they're really more of a pair of extra hands.

Like this year, the team wanted to be innovative, and I personally didn't think we would be able to do so great with the design we came up. The team went ahead and designed it the way they wanted to, thinking it was going to be awesome AND innovative. It was innovative, but not as awesome. There are two parts to the result of that. The team, and those behind the design realized that they need to definitely consider other designs and that they need to do a better job of being more precise than just building. The other lesson learned, is that I didn't think we'd do good at all, but we were able to score on the low goal occasionally, and ended up getting into eliminations.

So now the students have learned a lesson, and so have I. That's what FIRST teams are truly made of. Learning everywhere and everyone and everything. It's what makes it so cool.