[Tom Bottiglieri]

At one point in time there was a blurb on the FIRST website about effective mentorship. It went something like:
1) I do, you watch.
2) I do, you help
3) You do, I help
4) You do, I watch

It seems the scope of this was aimed at direct mentor/student interaction, but I see no reason this methodology cannot be applied to whole teams. I think the benefit of these tools becomes a lot clearer if you look at all of the teams in FIRST in the same way you look at students on your individual team. There are obviously some teams with more experience that do not need help but there are tons if teams that fall into bullet number 1 in the blurb above.

You wouldn't accuse your own student of cheating if they walked in to a build season completely green and watched/copied a mentor designing a mechanism for the robot, would you? This is a normal part of the learning process and you can hope the student would pick up enough to be inspired to learn more on their own and come back next build season ready to move on to bullets 2-3. Replace the words "student" with "new team" and "mentor" with "experienced community members" and the analogy still holds true.