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Originally Posted by Philmont629
Now for my personal opinion:
I think that the students should play the major role in designing and building the robot, but there still needs to be a strong adult presence. Every student should be allowed to come up with a design concept and present it to the team, then the team as a whole discuss all the designs then picks one to go with based on previously decided criteria. Discussion is where you need a single leader to step up and lead them unbiased because other wise chaos will break out. As for some of the other aspects of team running, competitions, style, travel, that stuff should be handled by team leaders. Competitions: team leaders should give the students a list of regionals that they find fit for the team to attend (whether it b distance, location, etc.) then let the students pick the regional or regionals they want to go to. Travel: travel should be handled by an adult leader from what I've seen students aren't to particular as to mode of transportation.
Bottom line involve the students and they may very well surprise you with how much they know.
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It also helps to have a good way to communicate your structure to all the members (adult and student). Joe layed out our team darn well up above. I think part of that is the fact that the student leaders and mentors spend ALOT of time after meetings talking over topics of concern. Our team hit it's stride last year, and it continued into this year. It only took us 4-5 years to work out the big kinks.
I think (I hope) that the mentors on our team are layed back enough so that the students feel free to talk over any concerns that they might have. During our design phase, the students didn't agree with the mentors, the mentors didn't agree with the mentors, and we all spent a day or two "talking agressively" - that says to me the students don't feel over powered by the mentors. It was a good thing. I hope everyone's teams, no matter how they are set up, can have the free-flowing communications that we hope to have (even when it includes yelling, kicking, and screaming.)
Besides, the students out number the mentors 20 to 1, so we have to fear our student overlords.