oof. This thread is like a car wreck, I don't want to look, but...
Really this is one of those issues that is best worked out as a compromise of the two extremes. The students don't learn much about how projects are engineered in real life if they just build robots on their own. In fact, they don't learn too much of anything. (this part failed! I guess it just wasn't strong enough...) You need the mentors there to tell
how things work, and
why they work that way! It's difficult to learn from just experience when the knowledge you are trying to absorb is so incredibly vast.
On the other side of things, having mentors build the whole robot without keeping the kids in the loop doesn't teach anything either. I doubt there are any teams that actually take this route, but obviously it doesn't do much inspiring if the kids don't get to play.
You need a mix of these extremes, though how you mix them depends on the team. I'm a fan of the 'kids get ideas, mentors suggest design philosophies, kids implement them, kids get design reviewed/criticized, repeat' strategy. This year has run incredibly smoothly for our team. We get ideas, the mentors advise, the kids get building, and the process repeats. I don't think we could have had a better build season. It actually ran so well that I don't think a mentor ever had to even touch the robot in the pits during the competitions; the students had it all under control!
Quote:
Originally Posted by squirrel
I finally got a student to teach me the very basics of Inventor, and I cadded the crate this year! woot!
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That's coming from team 1726's one and only mechanical mentor!