[JesseK]

Sorry that I'm simply skimming most of the replies -- this is a tough subject so I'll give my reply without letting another's thought sway mine.

It sounds like the mentors don't trust the students, and the students haven't been given an opportunity to be trusted by the mentors. In the end this will only burn everyone out.

First, your team needs firm leadership. It in incontravertibly the most important role on the team. Teams in the real world have team leads, and it's for a purpose. There has to be one person everyone can go to in order to keep everything straight. This will greatly help your communication issues. You (the students) need to let the lead know that you have a need to more effectively communicate with your mentors. If you don't agree with the leadership, well, that's tough sometimes. If you're good, you will learn the ways to get your ideas heard (usually it takes ALOT (aka TON, GRANDE, BEAUCOUP) of work on your part) regardless of whether you and the leadership get along.

Second, you need to sit down with your mentors and tell them how disappointed in them you are. Perhaps they are going off somewhere to build XX component because they themselves are unsure of how it's built and want to be able to learn on their own how to build it without students losing faith when they mess up 20 times before getting it right. Your disappointment should never be focused on something like this; it instead should be disappointing that they expect to use something they built during this private process without involving you at all so you could at least begin to fathom the realm of processes that went into the design and its iterations from the original.

However, to get past #2 in the 2008 season this far in, you will need some concrete evidence that trump's the mentor's decisions and/or bad fabrication methods. Usually "quality control" testing works for this regard so long as your team's budget isn't on the line. Be sure to record it via video tape or digital camera video, as it really is an important part of the engineering process. Remember, the QC process is important, NOT the fact that a part built by XYZ engineer failed -- NEVER point that out as it's rarely important: always stay positive! We literally sat and threw the trackball at our frame for 10 minutes throwing/dropping it from 6' up at different angles just to make sure the frame would hold itself together. We had to go back and support some things a mentor (aka me) didn't account for, but that's what a team is there for and I'm glad I was corrected by the students.

Third, students will realize after their first year that there are no magic wands in this world that make Cool Idea #1958742.b come to reality without extenuous thought and effort that usually includes CAD or a prototype. If it doesn't have either of those, it's usually not a cool idea that foster's ideas and input. To speed this process up, we encourage our Freshmen to do FTC only. This allows them to learn our entire engineering process and community image in a smaller, screw-up-friendly environment. Literally, if they build something to try and go fast only to have the wheels fall off at competition, no mentors say "I told you so". For FTC we simply guide them and let them take whatever way they want. It's then they realize that there are many ways to do something, and the best way usually is already being done by those who have already done it. After that, you'll see the pipe dream robots disappear.

Now on to reading the plethora of wisdom said before I got here...