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Re: Mentors
Shyra,
The best possible thing you can do to convince your team of the importance of having mentors is through this very forum. Throughout my years I have seen hundreds of rookie teams come into FIRST thinking that the competition was going to be a breeze, only to get caught up with major problems because they underestimated the challenge of the design and build process. Your team also needs to understand that though the EduBot is an excelent tool for learning the programing language and getting the basics of autonomous control down, it is the basics of robot design which are the main downfalls of rookie teams. Most rookie teams who have major problems are those teams who mismanaged time, or underestimated the difficulty of building a quality drive train. This is where mentors come in. If you look at the top contending teams each year, they are in most cases, stacked with engineers or teachers with extensive knowledge of engineering and the effort it takes to squeeze out something on a short deadline. I hope your team reads this post and the other posts on this board and realizes that engineers and other mentors are not part of FIRST to take over teams, they are there to enhance the experience of the students involved in the program through passing experience learned over the many years of performing tasks as difficult as this one.
Good Luck!
-Andy Grady
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