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Unread 07-02-2017, 00:50
DaveL DaveL is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2013
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Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...

No team is perfect, but it seems to me that you are not happy with the current direction and want to see your team grow.

My suggestions are to meet individually with the mentors and learn what motivates them. Then do the same with the team leadership and a random assortment of the rest of the team, making sure to include students from age (or grade).

My guess is that you will find mentors excited by the technical challenge, being respected and listened to as well as being part of a successful team. For the students its a chance to learn and grow, try out their ideas, enjoy socializing with people interested in robotics and physical nature of building something.

Having a stake in the outcome is another strong motivator. No one likes to be told, just do this without understanding the why.

Who does what in my mind is not important, so long as everyone gets a chance to influence the design. And yes in the rush to get something built, students that show up infrequently or late may not get to see the big picture. If you want that, then one has to be committed and willing to put in the time.

As a mentor, I feel my responsibilities are:
1. Safety (use protective gear, use the tools correctly, no playing with the tools or materials)
2. Protect the school, room and tools and without wasting material.
This included bumpers on the robot so the walls don't get damaged.
Using a vice or scrap lumber so holes are not drilled into tables.
Drill at the correct speed to avoid dulling bits.
Laying out a design on a side vs in the center of a board, to minimize scrap.
3. Teach. Proper tool use, design, strategy, the need to think thru a design instead of just cutting and building.
4. Have fun

I work best when students show up on time to meetings, share their ideas, willing to draw up their ideas and then discuss ways of building. Students that show up late, for a small part of the build meeting, spend most of their time socializing, manage to leave before its time to clean up, tend to disrupt the work flow and result in more mentor effort.

Like a sports team, the competition starts with team preparation. First learn how to draw and build. Buy parts early. Do some practice design and build activities. If your students can do that in the fall, I think your team will enjoy the competition more and the mentors go into cruse mode.

Every team is different, but FIRST is about students working with engineers.
How you draw the line of who does what is based on your coach and how they want to run the team. If you can get the team trained up in the fall and implement rational design decisions where everyone can contribute, its shouldn't matter as much who does what, since there is plenty to do during a build.

To your question, "Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?"
I have found that when teaching specific skills like filling or hack sawing, one student who thinks they are doing it right will pass on their bad habits. Its like the communication train. I tell one student something, they pass it on to the next student and before long the message has changed. So if you want to share a specific skill, a highly skilled mentor is the way to go.
But students will pay more attention to their peers and end up being more interested in that task. So the answer is it depends on the task and how skilled is the student.

Dave
Build Mentor
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