[Kyle]

I have been reading through this thread and i finial decided to post.
My team MOE 365 has a very strong mentor support, We are very very very lucky to have mentors and parents support from many different industry's and fields, By having those mentors our students are able to see a glimpse into what kind of careers they might want to go into. Yes we are very lucky to have a great group of support.
Is our robot built by our mentors? NO even though we have a strong engineer base, our bot is designed, built and programed by students. Our mentors work with us to help us learn what we are doing. Our bot has always been student designed engineer refined, that means we design it and then guide us to what can and cant work, With out our great mentors I know that I would have never learned how to work on a drive train or pneumatics system. Working with them has been the best experience of my life.
It was said before that this is not a science fair, that means that kids can work with mentors to help them and that is what happens, they help them.
I do not see any problem with those teams that get help from or build/machine parts of the bot for them, as long as the students learn something. That is what FIRST is all about teaching Kids, about life and some science stuff to.
It is sad that some teams do not have any mentors beyond a parents or a teacher, but just remember that those people are still teaching you a lesion just like everyone else's mentors are.
I am sorry about the wording of this post, This topic was really hard for me to express my feelings in words, So I am going to end it here.