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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
I think letting the students run and control the club/team aspect is excellent. But to let the students think they can compete against teams that have adult engineeing mentors would be cruel and pointless - all you are doing is setting them up to fail - and then they will come to the conclusion that engineering is complicated, too hard for them, something they are not good at - in other words, they will decide engineering sucks!
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As a team with no adult engineering help, I'd like to think that this type of team is very possible. I don't believe that a team without the availability of adult engineers is 'cruel and pointless' by any means, and if anything, motivates the students to learn more about the subject to compete effectively.
Teams that are run by students are not necessarily destined to fail. Just because a team does not have mentors of its own does not mean that other teams cannot intervene and help. There are many successfully run student-led teams, and there are success stories from all over. While you are correct in saying that students should be in charge of the organizational matters of the team, a team is not being set up for failure in the instance that they do not have adult mentors.
No team in FIRST fails, engineerless or plentiful.