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Unread 21-03-2013, 01:22
Laaba 80 Laaba 80 is offline
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AKA: Joey
FRC #1714 (MORE Robotics)
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Re: The Meaning of FIRST

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber View Post
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.
This is a great point, and I would like to expand on it a little bit with some of my own experiences.

When I graduated, a few of the students I had mentored in FLL were joining our FRC team and were interested in programming. We had an awesome senior who was a better programmer than I was take care of the main robot code, so I mainly worked with the new guys. When I first worked with them we took the line sensors from the 2011 kit, and we decided to make a line follower. I wrote 100% of the code that went into it, but I made them tell me what to code. I wanted to teach them that the hard part of programming is figuring out exactly what they want the robot to do. The syntax is the easy part, it just takes a little time to get used to. The rest of the season went on mostly like that.

The next year the programming was all up to those students. They had become more comfortable with actually programming the robot on their own, so we all worked together pretty evenly. As that season went on they became better and better at programming on their own.

This season one of the programming mentors who was around back when I was a student was able to get more heavily involved with the team again. The programmers would write their code, then once they were done that mentor would help them make it more professional. I think this was a big help for them. I was able to teach them how to just make a program work, he is able to teach them how to code everything in the best way. At our last competition when our pit programmer would want to make a change, he would explain to me what he was doing, he would code it, I would take a quick look through it mainly as a second set of eyes, then he would put it in the robot and test it.

I really believe that the amount of work a mentor should do is dependent on how much knowledge or experience the students have in the subject. That is the approach my mentors had when I was a student, and I really enjoyed it. I probably wouldn't have stuck with programming if I had't had great mentors to help me get started. This has been a recipe for success, and I plan to stick with it until the students stop enjoying it or stop learning.
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