[Sarah Johnson]

As I was reading through this thread, and I have read several others like it around Chief Delphi, it struck me that most of the people posting were debating how mentors can or cannot be too involved... and I personally have a totally different opinion on the whole thing. I think that on my team for one, the mentors and engineers let the students do TOO much.

I am on team 573, and although many of my teammates would disagree, I feel that our mentors often step back in situations where our robot could have turned out a lot better. Our teachers are proud that they are never in the pits and that the students operate the whole team by themselves. I'm not saying that because every student on the team knows how to maintain and fix the robot, it is a bad thing. What I am saying is that the mentors should be involved and working with the students, to engineer the robot. More often than not, actually.

I love how our team has excellent student involvement and dedication. What I am concerned about it how our mentors feel that this is "the students" team and not a collaboration of engineers and students. I think that if we had a cooler robot that was designed better than students could do (virtually) alone, we would be more inspired and I am sure we would love our robot just as much... if not more.

I am always amazed by the robots the big powerhouse teams have. I find myself wondering why we can't have a robot like that. I always come back to the fact that students could never have built those robots with even minimal engineer involvement. The teams who build those kind of awesome robots definitely do not step back and let the students take over. The engineers play a big role on those team. I feel more inspired by those robots. I get excited when I see them. I even cheer for them (at times) more enthusiastically than my own robot. Like in the elimination rounds.

I think that when a robot can do that for someone who hasnt even taken part is building and designing it... you know they are pretty darn inspiring. I love my team and our robot, but I just wanted to say that not all students like to build the robot ALL by themselves. Also, that mentors CAN do "too little" as well as "too much"