As far as the robot goes, our mentors consist of a machinist, and an auto mechanic who runs his own garage, and lets us use the shop. For "machining" we have a belt sander, a jigsaw, a table top drill press, and at about week 4, the mentors bought us a table top bandsaw. These guys are great, they donate tons of time, and money, and always let us kids do the work; which I find to be really awesome. They let us know when they think something is going to go awry, but for the most part we learn the lessons ourselves, and we all seem to be happy with the system, I know I am anyway. And the sysetm does seem to work, this was our rookie year and including the Championship event we ended the season with 5 trophies, and Rookie All-star for our regional.
I've seen the threads which talk about how the purpose of FIRST is to inspire kids to get into engineering, not neccesarily, have the kids engineering the robot. I have to disagree, how can an outsider ever truly get a taste for whats required of something like this?
I don't know how other people feel, but personally being on a rookie team, I wasn't even thinking about the competition, seeing our team work together to create such a beautiful machine was a reward in itself. Competing, and competing in a manner that I would call succesful was just a bonus. (And maybe a way to justify missing 2 weeks of class, to see the rest of your robots
)