[sciguy125]

I think that the roles of mentors ultimately depend on what the team wants to gain by participating in FIRST. We seem to have two followings in our team. 1351's leadership seems to have been pushing us toward engineering. They want the team to learn about science, engineering, and technology. Having fun is a second priority. However, there are some that want the team to be something "fun". They want to be here to be with friends and play with a cool robot, making learning a lower priority. With the current leadership soon to be changed, we may change our direction to the latter, depending on how things play out. I'm not saying that you can't generally have fun while you learn and vice versa, just that different people have prioritized them differently. In certain situations, however, you will have to pick whether you want to have fun or you want to learn, with very little middle ground. In those situations, people will go with whichever they want more. Having said that, I'd like to discuss mentors.

To the engineering folk who want to learn, mentors are best suited to teaching. The students get to fumble around a little, but still get help from mentors when they need it. I've found that you can never truly learn something until you do it. I can sit here and tell you everything you need to know about programming, but until you try it, you'll never actually understand how to do it. For instance, you may try to do something that may cause a problem. I never actually told you not to do it, however, because it seemed obvious to me. Everyone has different levels of expertise and has had different experiences in their lives. Until you try something for yourself, you'll never truly be prepared for it.

To those that want to have fun, more mentor involvement would be better. The students can focus less on try to learn how everything works and spend more time playing with everything. The kit comes with enough parts and instructions to make a functional robot, though not that spectacular. For some, that may be enough. They get to spend time with their friends and do something together, but not get caught up with the boring book learning. The mentors, depending on the exact situation, may have to pick up the slack that the students don't really want to take care of themselves.

As another example to my point, my friend does battlebots. He tried to get me into it also, but I just didn't like it. He is a mechanical person and I'm an electronics person. He has fun building the robot. He likes to cut the metal and weld it together. He loves doing the math to show that his robot could probably beat up a car. He doesn't care, however, how the electronics work. He works with the black box mentality. Boxes A and B are connected together using wire C. It doesn't matter how they work as long as they do. As for me, I can care less about the mechanical aspect of it (but battlebots is more geared toward it, which is why I didn't like it). I have more fun programming and designing the electronics. If I had someone to build the chassis, I could spend all the time I want playing with my new mobile electronics platform of doom. My friend, however, would want the opposite.

Now I'm not saying that you should decide your mentor involvement on whether or not you want to have fun or want to learn. I'm also not saying that my opinions are the best way to handle the situations presented. I'm just posing these as examples. Your team may have totally different priorities, or they may just be finer striations of the points that I brought up. Maybe your team wants to prepare students for industry. In that case, you'd need more mentor involvement to teach them how things are done. Maybe your team just wants to give students general engineering knowledge and skills. In this case, less involvement may be better. If you're looking for a way to hang out, parents (depending on how you feel about your family) may be better because now it's a family event.

In the end, your team needs to sit down and decide where you want FIRST to take you. Once you know where you want to go, you can decide how you want to get there.