Quote:
Originally Posted by WMFlip16
Hello,
I am a junior on team 2137 and have been involved in FIRST since I was on an FLL team in 2008. We recently had our first competition of the year at Waterford and did ok. On our second day of the competetion, me and my dad went in early because i had some work to do with my code. We moved into the cafeteria and I started debugging the code and adjusting things. After a while, some mentors came in and sat down at a table and began talking. They talked of things that needed to change, which I have no problem with, and how they could improve it. The part that i had a problem with was when a mentor started talking about what HE had changed, and what HE had did, which bugged me. It also bugged me that the team won an award for their programming.
This brings up a question.
Is this your team? Is winning more important than learning? Is it really helping inspire or teach students? So please mentors, let us do all the work, Its better that way. Maybe you too can win the award titled "I dont do anything" like our programming mentor did.
Sincerely, A Peeved Programmer
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Mentoring has a couple different facets. We can do, we can show, or we can guide. Which is best is based on the mentor's style of mentoring, the students' style of learning, and the task at hand.
Now, my personal style is very heavy show/guide and very little do. I have not written a line of code for 79's robot this year. What I have done is handled much of the systems engineering and project management for our software team. Why do I mention this? Because there are some tasks that students simply aren't ready to undertake. I trust my students to manage their own tasks, to write effective code, and work together to accomplish tasks. I don't expect them to have a detailed understanding of how the mechanical and electrical systems on the robot work or the best sensor for a task. As such we work in a partnership, I do my part. They do theirs. Together we achieve our goals.
Sincerely, A (proud) Member of a Software
Team