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Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
The best way to learn is not through mistakes. It is far better ( and more efficient) to learn through other's mistakes and that's what mentors are doing. They are providing the benefit of their experience and passing it on to the students. If you were to exist just on trial and error without any benefit of past experience you could "wander around in the desert" forever and never come up with the solution. Man has made it this far by not reinventing the wheel every time a new idea comes into his head.
On the subject of mic mixing and feedback prevention, a mentor who lets you "do it yourself" so that you can hear the subtleties leading to feedback has fallen far short of a very complex discussion on the subject. Things that affect feedback are not only mix related but include the acoustics of the hall, mic selection, room equalization and a little thing known as NOM. There are spaces in existence that can never be corrected and there are mic that can be used in a great acoustic space that cannot be "mixed" to sound good or guarantee no feedback. As a student of this art for a very long time, I can tell you that I am still learning as are most of my peers, because sound science is still in it's infancy.
Finally, all teams take pride in their robot, but it is easy to become down heartened when you think you have done everything correctly and the robot still does not act or react as you think. Over the years, many teams without engineer mentors have asked for my help at competitions.
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Your point is well taken and you have said more or less what i was alluding to in the usefulness of an experienced mentor.
I don't believe you need to make the mistakes for yourself i mean more along the lines of a mentor being responsible enough to tell why something does not work and what will go wrong to make sure the student understands the inner workings.
It is ludicrous to reinvent the wheel when the wheel is made
but when inventing a new wheel it is better to do it with the experience of your peers and mentors
I have a larger problem when a team talks about sending the gearboxes to be professionally machined
It is nice to see a fellow Sound Technician here. You got me wrong in my explanation of how he teaches us. He is a physics teacher and spares no gruesome detail in explaining what sound is and what effects it(hall, Mic, and room equalization) we do talk about what could cause a problem like the hiss of a bad cable or a bad Mic or the Tin Can syndrome as we call it. I just did not feel the need to go into the technical aspects of it but it is true you can never finish learning.