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Unread 17-04-2005, 18:50
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Richard Wallace Richard Wallace is offline
I live for the details.
FRC #3620 (Average Joes)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Rookie Year: 1996
Location: Southwestern Michigan
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Re: When do mentors go too far?

Back in graduate school, I bought a poster-size portrait of Einstein that features one of his most recognized quotations as a caption: "Imagination is more important that knowledge." [see my sig area below for the unabridged version of the quote and a link to an insightful essay on the subject]

That poster has been a fixture in my office for many years now. I never get tired of it.

This has been a great thread. I have been a mentor/sponsor/advisor for several kinds of technical competition over the years. I like FIRST better than the rest, and this thread has help me understand why. It's because FIRST is mostly about inspiration (and recognition), not education. Of course I am a big fan of education -- before taking my present job, I spent sixteen years either enrolled in or employed by institutions of higher learning. Knowledge is the foundation on which inspiration is built. But inspiration is the fountainhead of new knowledge, and of course old knowledge soon becomes as dry as dust without the new life that inspiration brings to every field of endeavor.

So I think it really does not matter whether an FRC team's robot is built by mentors or by students. All that matters is that everyone who participates in FIRST, or even just watches at an FRC event, gets inspired to imaginative participation in a world where science and technology become more important every day.
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Richard Wallace

Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)