Many teams function different ways, I'll just say that first. As for who builds and designs the robot, it's up to the team, for mentors to take everything away from the students and do everything is WRONG, whether is be in terms or building the robot, running meetings or making travel plans, it's wrong. A mentor is there to MENTOR, not do all the work. Talk to your team leader or if it's the leader that's taking over robotics, and a group of students believe the same thing as you, talk to your parents. Parents are amazing people, they tend to have a lot of influence, not just on you. Things can always be resolved.
In terms of robots, I'll describe my team (173) to you as best I can. We have one head engineer on our team, Mr Hockaday (AMAZING MAN) who basically coordinates everything engineering. He's completely open to any suggestion you have. When the season begins, he fully encourages students to design and prototype anything that could be used for the robot, and some have in the past, but not this year. Adult mentors and other engineers do the same thing. He also presents his designs to the other engineers and other people (mainly students) who want to hear about it, waiting for a critque or even if you just want to hear it. This year, we have Mr Hockaday designing the drive train, another engineer designing the arm, a gripper designed and perfected by many. Another engineer did the pneumatics. This just HAPPENS to be the way things turn out. No students asked to design anything, he continually asked.
As someone stated before, students can't always sit down and do all the math and such to the designing process ( i am one of those kids) Not all kids that come into the program have the desire or determination to design things. Our engineers designed everything, everyone was open to critque.
Being one of the students heavily involved with build, he explained his design before, while and after we put it together. A few interested students even learned a bit about designing things.
Our robot was build by both students and mentors, by student's choice. I know that robot and how it works like the back of my hand. Ask our engineers. Just because Ididn't design it doesn't mean that my mentors over took it, it means I didn't want to design anything, and there's nothing wrong with that.
This is just my team.
Also, adults have over taken things in the past, and we (my class imparticular
) have fought for it back. And we've gotten it. We're about 50% student run, although we have a set-up to be completely student run, we don't have the student power for that yet.
As for mentors that go too far, sometimes you just need to talk to them. Our mentors constantly ask if they're taking over or doing too much. Most mentors WANT you be involved. Sometimes mentors just don't realize they're doing so much and that you wanted to do it.