[AmyPrib]

I agree with the majority of people here already.... I feel a great way to achieve a well-run team is to have a good balance. The mentors must empower the students to design, build, lead, etc, and the students must be open to learning from the mentors, same as the mentors must be open to learning from students. It's a two-way street and I don't think you can logically argue that. There are some teams that have little to no mentors (or vice versa), but where there's a will, there's a way.. to recruit them... or recruit the help of other teams.

However, the key is defining.... what is inspiration... what is a mentor... what is an engineer... what is a teacher....what is winning...what is good performance....what is an award....what are your goals....what is FIRST about.... Everyone will have a variation to those definitions. So you are always going to have different opinions on what is the best way to run a team. The students will have one idea, the adults will have an idea... Hopefully those groups can come to an agreement. There must be give and take, but above all there must be learning on each side. Many times people have said "inspiration is letting the students do all the work and learn from their failures", while others have said "inspiration is leading by example, teaching students fundamental skills to carry thru the future". I think.. it's BOTH.

I honestly don't feel anyone can realistically say "a student-run team is better" or a "mentor-run team is better". If a student on a student-run team says "a student run team is best way", that implies they know everything (aka "we don't need mentors for anything, they cause more harm than good"). If a mentor says it about a mentor-run team, same implication, and I think that's ludicrous. The students have next to zero "professional" work or real-world experience, and I feel they need someone who does to be effective. But that's not to say adults know everything either - they learn from the creativity and "unconditioned" or "out of the box" ideas from students.

There are positive aspects to all 3 ways of running a team, but personally I feel there are only negative aspects in purely student-run, or mentor-run. (I'm not saying either are terrible, I'm saying there are some negatives to it and most of them are obvious)... The difficult part about a "well-balanced" team is: maintaining the balance between the sides.

So, that's what I think. If there are disagreements within the team about how to run it, then perhaps a team evaluation of your definitions of the above words is in order.