[ebarker]

It is time for the periodic all-mentor versus all-student debate.

The all-mentor is obviously not a desirable situation.

But is an all-student situation desirable ?

In normal practice there should be a continuous cascade of knowledge spilling over to the less experienced team members and and continuous upward flow of members gaining experience. Almost like a continuous fractional distillation column.

In FIRST parlance it is the "cascade of mentorship". More experienced members (mentors, highly experienced students) raising up junior members. FRC teams to FLL teams, etc.

Maybe if this collaborative team experience doesn't exist in the steady state then either mentors are not giving up knowledge and challenging the students enough, OR the students are not learning as fast as they could with some good mentorship.

For thousands of years people learned their trades in an apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman educational progression. Where did the idea come from to abandon that method to throwing a KOP on the floor in front of a group of inexperienced students (or mentors) and expect that to be optimal?

Kudos to all those that have struggled to get the robot designed and built without any help. Just think how much more you could have learned if there had been a good healthy collaborative partnership with mentors and experienced students.

The student versus mentor debate tends to miss the point. It is more helpful to describe the model for teams to strive to achieve. The "continuous cascade" principle is probably a pretty good description.

I like the "continuous fractional distillation" idea. Raw students in, pure engineers out.