Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivan Malik
With the debate of primarily mentors built vs primarily student built, FIRST proper (aka dean, woody, etc.) has never issued any sort of ruling on the matter. It is rather safe to say that they are the governing authority of FIRST at large. Their silence means that it is up to the rest of the FIRST community to form some sort of tacit or un-tacit construct that controls this idea among the community at-large. This will happen either with a conscious community effort or naturally without any conscious control of it by the community.
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The following is a quote from Dave Lavery from the 2008 kickoff. The full transcript is here:
http://robotics.arc.nasa.gov/events/...transcript.php
Quote:
But a lot of people say Dave, isn't that hard and tough?
Guess what?
This is supposed to be hard, this is supposed to be difficult.
Dean mentioned already if you think the program is about robots you're missing part of the message.
There are a lot of teams out there, and i know i'll hear back from them about this, there are a lot of teams out there who are built solely of students as a student-built, student-run, student-organized team from end to end to the process.
I congratulate them what they're able to accomplish and do.
They're able to participate with no problem at all.
Do the task we're setting out for them.
If you think the task is about building a robot.
My challenge to the teams is, part of what we're trying to do is get you exposed to real world technologies practices, people who are professionals.
If you're doing this with your team you're able to build the robot and able to compete and be able to be a participant in the program but i think you're missing the point if you don't have an engineering on your team or two or three or four because you aren't taking advantage of the opportunity to expose your team and your students to real world engineering practices to learn to be inspired by the professionals to which you have access.
So is this a hard problem?
Yes.
It's supposed hard.
We're making it hard because we want you to be encouraged to go out and get professional engineering help for your teams to help solve this stuff.
That's how you're going to get the most benefit out of the entire program.
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While he doesn't address how much mentor vs how much student, it's very clear that no mentor involvement is not the correct answer.