"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Andrew Schreiber again."
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Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man
I am (personally) more concerned with a mentor-designed robot than mentor-built robot (where you look at the robot and have no idea how someone of your experience could design a machine of this high complexity, much less high school students), but this side of the coin never seems to be addressed. Is design just something that is assumed to be mentor guided?
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I think "built" is sometimes used as shorthand for "designed and constructed" in these discussions. The posters see any heavy mentor involvement as a disservice to the students, or somehow unfair. I don't think either of these things are necessarily true at all. These assumptions are addressed and deconstructed in numerous other threads, so I won't break this down.
I don't think a mentor designed robot is a bad thing in the slightest. I do agree that all the focus on who cuts the metal is kind of missing the point - if a hypothetical dissenter wanted students to be "doing the engineering", a student designed and mentor built robot would be closer to that than the opposite. However, I really think that this detailed design stuff is rather hard, and to expect every team of students to do it without significant help is silly.
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Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man
Well, if being a mentor-built robot isn't wrong, why does everyone seem to get so upset about it when someone is accused of it?
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Baseless accusations are still very bad things, even if the thing they are being accused of isn't as bad as some people believe it to be.