[Joe J.]

Lightning Robotics has been both a Mentor Driven team and a Student Driven team.
Back in 2000 and 2001 (as 465) a lot of the robot work was done by mentors.

In 2002 with a new sponsor we switched to a Student Driven team and have been that way ever since.
Last year we were worried about losing our machining capabilities, both access to the shop and mentors who had access to it, so we created our Hacksaw & Drill philosophy. We used this last year, designing the robot so that it could be using only simple hand tools. It worked extremely well.
We used it again this year with one difference, we did lose easy access to our sponsors machine shop.

The Hacksaw & Drill philosophy also allows more student involvement, a hacksaw requires much less training time than a band saw, and is safer to use. As a result our robots are almost 100% student built.

Now this is how our team operates, I know other teams operate differently and thats fine.

As for Student vs. Mentor built a lot of that can depend on the resources available to each team. It's common knowledge that some teams have better funding, or lots of mentors, or facilities better suited to build and test a robot. If they have them they should use them. Each team has its own way of carrying out the vision of FIRST.