[ksafin]

I don't know..

After reading these posts, I've seen a few examples of how schools operate with FTC and FRC.

We operate in this fashion:

Since 1st semester is FTC season, students work the entire first semester a few times a week after school for 1-2 hours on FTC alone. They have veteran FRC/FTC members and one mentor who is my dad and has been with us since we introduced FIRST to the school. Aside for that, FTC is an experience we give to students to be able to experiment, get their feet wet in engineering and ready for FRC that lies ahead; it's not limited to any grade, but rather it's an engineering warm-up for what lies ahead.

I'm not saying mentoring is absent, I'm saying it exists when questions are asked, and mentors point a lot of things out, but overall the students are entirely in control of the design.

Then in FRC we get more mentor heavy, and follow suit like most FRC teams.