Exactly how I ended up mentoring a team in Hollywood, Florida 3 and a half hours away while also mentoring a team in central Florida is one for a different thread, It has given me some experience mentoring a team too far for me to go down and visit frequently.
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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
If you've ever mentored long-distance, how did you remain in contact with your team? How successful were you?
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In the case of 4592 I joined knowing my greatest help would be to streamline processes and provide educational resources as there main problem preventing success was a simple lack of direction and mistrust in common FIRST practices. It turned out the team already had a system for mentors to Skype into build meetings making it easy for me to teach CAD and communicate frequently enough that I would be considered part of the team and prevent the "celebrity appearance" problem that can arise when mentors rarely appear in build meetings.
Also, I found that being available via text message can be of huge help. For instance, when the mechanical team was unsure how to measure the relative success or failure of various bin grabber prototypes, it was relatively easy for me to explain that they needed to create an excel spreadsheet, do some time trials and, using excel's tools, figure out which ones where the fastest/ most consistent.
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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
How did you keep your fields of expertise relevant?
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By finding ways to implement my areas of expertise into areas that I are not an expert in. In my case, only the programmers had ever used excel before while myself as a strategist and engineering major use it constantly. So when the mechanical team (possibly my weakest area of expertise) had a problem I tried to apply a solution that not only familiarized them with a tool they will likely use in the future but also allowed me to learn a little more mechanical design/ iteration by looking at what worked and what didn't.
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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
My fear, though, is that once I am graduated and able to mentor full-time, I'll have been out of the FRC community for long enough that I'll no longer be current on how everything works anymore.
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Mentoring multiple teams could be an answer to this problem. There will always be rookie teams whom where ineligible to submit for awards in there previous year and less experienced teams who don't even know where to start when it comes to award presentation and submission. When I started mentoring 4592 basic concepts like iterating a design, match playbooks and consistency over features seamed completely foreign while on 1065 these things are done without even thinking about them since both our teacher and lead mentor have well over 10 years of first experience each.
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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
All that leaves me with is email and Google applications like Drive, where I can edit and comment the Chairman's documents in real time with them. Other than that, I don't have much opportunity for interaction.
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Sounds helpful to me. Especially if no other mentors are available or the students want to work on it with a mentor while not at the build space. As for methods of communication, figure out what the students naturally use and go to that system. Ive spent more time on facebook talking to students about how to design gearboxes and edit promotional videos than just about anything else.
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Originally Posted by VexisDarksteele
how difficult was it to get back into the swing of things? How did you remain current on all the changes made?
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As notorious as it is for things like FRC confessions, Twitter is actually really good for this. I've used it to do everything from contacting teams I had an interest in mentoring to seeing what happened during demos and multi team practice sessions that i couldn't attend.