[Seelix]

There are clearly two sides to this argument. As for me personally, I've been in FIRST for two years, and been on two incredibly different teams at very oposite ends of the spectrum. My first FIRST team (why does that never get old?) was a very small team. We didn't have the time or the student base needed to have the kids do everything alone, and we REALLY didn't have the mentor base to be able to teach every student to do everything alone. Our goal was just to get it all done in whatever way we could- even if that meant mentors stepping in a lot more than some teams think they should. It worked though, and because of those limited resources I learned that if you want of know something you need to step up and bother someone until they show you, and once you know you better be able to do it AND teach it to someone else too.
This year I was on a very large first year team. We were blessed with a lot of brilliant and dedicated mentors, a combination I was anticipating to mean that the students did practically nothing. Then we decided to go with a very "hands off" approach that meant that the kids learned a truley incredible amount of skills in a short time, but we could also afford to take the time and take students away from working long enough to explain how every little thing worked before letting the kids do it. Both these approaches have been praised and criticized, along with all the other 2000+ ways teams are run, but in my experience every FRC team values student learning- and values it in a different way than every other FRC team. As long as the students learned SOMETHING, (whether it was programing skills, shop skills, life skills, team work, or just that if you stay at school long enough during build season pizza will arrive) then the goal has ultimately been accomplished.