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Originally Posted by Rickertsen2
Heh. You said it!! Last year was our teams rookie year and our team had no mentors. We were more or less a student run team. We were fortunate in that each of us was strong in some area or another and we more or less had no trouble with the technical side of things, but we were totally lost. We were lost not because of a lack of technical knowledge(not to say there isn't a lot we could have learned), but rather because of a loss of management knowledge. None of us had ever overseen or managed anything, and we were clueless in this area.
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Management Knowledge is the most important thing a mentor can help your team with. Management of an engineering project is not something that a high school student would generally have had experience with. After all, the most common equivalent project that comes close, that a high school student might have done is an Eagle Scout project (or the Girl Scout equivalent), and not all of those. So, since high schoolers in general have not had experience in managing projects, how could they expect to be any good at it? Especially when they are competing against pros who do it every day?
Even most teachers, who understand classroom management, do not understand engineering project management. But Project Management is one of the keys to a successful robot.
So yes you do need help, but Keith is right when he says that the team needs to figure that out for themselves. Unfortunately, some lessons are best learned through hard experience. One of the best lessons I ever learned was spending a day digging a ditch. But it came with lots of blisters! Don't be discouraged if your team winds up "wasting" a year. If they figure out what they did wrong by not accepting help when they needed it, then at least they will have learned something, and it may be a far more valuable lesson than anything a mentor would have taught them about building a robot!