[dcbrown]

I find most of the team problems I've experienced in the last three build seasons were due to mentors purposefully excluding students - or worse giving them responsibility for some facet of the robot only to take it away at the last moment during the build.

It came down to a culture issue.

My view is that the goal of FIRST is to buddy students with mentors where building a robot to play a game is the method to frame that interaction. The view of other mentors is that the goal of FIRST is to build a robot using a method of mentors buddying with students. The important difference is that *if* the goal is to build a robot, especially one that can win the game, then how a mentor interacts or doesn't with all interested students becomes a secondary concern.