[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by jweston

Walking the line between "mentor built" and "mentor enabled" can be a fine one, especially for teams that are deficient in certain student skillsets. "Mentor built" often means different things to different people.

It can be a tough call when you have, for instance, advanced students on your mechanical and electrical team but only basic skilled students on your programming team. Do you tell the mechanical and electrical teams they can't build certain things because the programmers won't be able to support it? If you do allow mechanical and electrical to build to their potential, how much and what kind of support as a mentor do you provide to the overwhelmed programmers? How do you balance success to encourage pursuit of STEM with student participation? It's not easy. The answers will be a little different for each team in any given year.

Getting back to judges, another worry I have is once in a while a judge will mistake one of our students as a mentor. This usually happens to taller, mature, highly knowledgable seniors. Sometimes I get the feeling that we weren't believed when we correct this misperception.

Quite honestly, though, while the amount of mentor involvement is a very important personal debate for teams to have internally, it shouldn't have the slightest bit of relevance to judged awards at all. And what a judge perceives as "student built" or "mentor built" shouldn't matter. If an inspired student can professionally explain a quality mechanism within the criteria of an award, they should be eligible for the tech award. If a team of students manages to inspire not only themselves but the community at large through promoting STEM awareness, then they should be eligible for EI. And no student should have to convince any judge that they are the sole entity who built a quality, professional looking mechanism in order for the team to deserve recognition for it.