[GreyingJay]

As a brand new mentor I appreciate the feedback in this thread. Thanks all.

I have really enjoying being part of my first build season and first regional competition (second one coming up in a few weeks).

I can resonate with some of the frustrations other teams are feeling, but from a slightly different perspective. Our team has many enthusiastic, young (grade 9) students who want to help but find it frustrating that their abilities to contribute are limited. They can't all have contradicting ideas make it into the final design. They aren't all skilled enough to write code that will benefit the final robot. They don't all have the skills needed to do much in the fabrication and assembly of the robot. (This goes for me too. I barely know how to tap a thread, let alone teach a student to do it.)

I really like some of the ideas in this thread.. ongoing tool training sessions during robotics meeting times, programming on previous years' robots (complicated this year by the switch from cRio to RoboRio, but next year we will have this year's robot as a good starting point). The enthusiasm is there, the skills and learning will come. I am excited to continue working with these students over the coming years... I hope they will stick it out.

My introduction to FIRST and FRC has been a blast. I love, LOVE the fact that students are interested in engineering and programming. I want to do everything I can to make sure they get a positive experience out of being on an FRC team, and not feel like they are useless or not able to contribute as much as "the bigger kids".