Quote:
|
Originally Posted by TimCraig
Yada yada. Basically, this has been run into the ground on here. Even if everyone adhered to your approach of mentors playing rah-rah and the students doing "most" of the work, you still have the case of some schools having very heavily invested in vocational programs and have state of the art machine tools available with students capable of running them. Just listen to some in today's posts talking about CNC mills and laser cutters. My team has no such tools, in fact this high school has gutted their vocational programs and currently offers none, but they do have a capable engineer, if I do say so, helping them. So where do you draw the line?
|
I'd say you draw the line at the point that there is no student that could do what the engineer could doing. Maybe teach the student how to do <blah>, but then the engineer does <blah> for time or quality reasons. If the engineer simply says "and then I'm going to do this!" and the student really has no idea what he is going to do or why, then you haven't inspired anything. All you've got is a bunch of engineers building a robot with a couple HS students watching. I'm fine with engineers building stuff when time is tight or quality needs are paramount (and a learning student might screw it up a few times), but it they're doing stuff that students absolutely cannot do, it seems to defeat the purpose of learning things while building your robot. When I mentor programming, I try to make sure that the students do all the work unless we're on a close deadline to get a feature working. It's a high school competition, not a "hey engineers! find a bunch of high schoolers to enter for you so you and your coworkers can build a robot" competition.
At the very least, the students should be PRESENT when the robot is being worked on so they might pick something up. I've seen way too many teams where the students are off in the stands while their team of professional engineers fix/upgrade their robot in the pits.