[D. Gregory]

Our team is student designed and run. Us students completely design, refine, and draft the rovot. For the building, often it is the students setting up the cut/drill and the adult pressing the button and push/pulling. This is because our board has insanely strict regulations about students using power tools. For a school with 2200 students and class sizes of 25-30, we only have 3 teachers who are allowed to supervise us cutting. One of them is on our team but we can't expect him to be with us all the time. We have two mentors, a former team member who has mentored us since our 2000-2001 Canada FIRST season, and another adult who helps us with cutting and building. Our first mentor acts as a regular team member who doeasn't need supervision cutting. Our second member acts as the hand who presses the power button. Our team is more rookie this year than it was last years. Last year most, of our team was returning members from the previous Canada FIRST year. Out of 32 members this year, there are only 3 returning members. I really don't have a problem with heavily mentored teams as long as the students in the pits know their robot. It bugs me when
a) You see 5 mentors working around a robot with no students helping
b) When the students don't know how their robot works.
Mentors are a very important part of FIRST but student learning and experience is what makes FIRST what it is. Some teams may want to re-evaluate how they work. A mentor-less FIRST would not be good but a mentor-run FIRST would ruin it. One issue that hasn't been looked at is that heavily mentored teams set the bar so high for complicated scoring bots that it forces less supported teams to take the simpler pusher/power route in order to remain competitive. If anything, overly mentored teams decrease the creativity of un-supported teams who wish to remain competitive.