FRC is about giving students the best experience possible. It's clear that one or more problems with team dynamics has diluted the quality of your experience. Other's have suggested ways to address the problems in the team, so I'm going to take a slightly different tack.
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Originally Posted by Martian86
We (the students) are capable of most of the design, build, wiring, controls, programming, etc, aspects of the robot; at the very least, we're just as capable as the mentors since many of the parts are specialized for FRC, especially the control system.
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If this is actually the case then I'd recommend finding additional mentors or encouraging your mentors to explore the FRC resources in greater depth. For example the source code for much of WPILib is available for perusal and an experienced software engineer can get a much better understanding of the overall control system by reading that source code.
However it is probable that your technical mentors actually are more capable and substantially more experienced than the students at designing and troubleshooting technical systems. As humans we have inherent cognitive biases like the Dunning-Kruger effect that can mask real ability to other team members.
So as other posters have already pointed out it looks as if the problems are more social and/or cultural than technical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian86
3. At another point, two mentors were arguing over something in the design (specifics aren't important) and leaving students out of the discussion completely. I ended up telling them, in the most respectful way I could, that they needed to explain to the students what they were discussing and then take a break from the robot for a couple of hours. I'll admit this must have been entertaining to watch, a 17 year old girl telling two grown men to go on a time out, but it should not have been necessary.
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This point reminded me of a cultural difference I've noticed in FRC around the role of constructive conflict. This can be between students and mentors or between engineering and faculty mentors.
In a High School context most problems are artificially designed, bounded, relatively easy and have known solutions. Furthermore social order is a critical priority, it's necessary to maintain a power gradient between faculty & students, group consensus is prized and conflict is almost always treated as something to be avoided.
However in the real world of STEM, problems are usually hand, unbounded and have no packaged solution. Ideas and possible solutions have to be discussed and good solutions often arise from combining ideas. It's usually necessary to talk through the potential weaknesses of a proposal to identify improvements. In other words well managed conflict is absolutely critical for success.
It may seem unusual and possibly shocking to see "two grown men" "arguing over something in the design" but you might be seeing a very important part of the creative process in action.
For anyone interested in this topic I'd recommend the research from Charlan Nemeth of Berkeley on the importance of conflict in creativity.