[writchie]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

I can't imagine why you would deprive your FTC students of the mentor support that you find so essential to the motivational and educational aspects of your FRC program. You say that mentor involvement is life-changing, but you choose not to provide that to students in FTC. It sounds to me like you, as mentors, are not giving these students your best effort.

I know this sounds argumentative, and I apologize for that. I truly want to understand why you wouldn't take something you know to be critical -- "heavy" mentor involvement -- and offer it to all of your students.

Wow.

Perhaps we should say to our engineering mentors, "thanks a lot for spending nearly every day of the last 6 weeks mentoring our mostly 17 and 18 year old motivated FRC students and helping to change some of their lives - BUUUUUT why do you insist on DEPRIVING 5 times as many 14 and 15 year old FTC students by not teaching them which way a screw turns for another 20 weeks." Do you really think this would help sustain a long term program?

It might be nice to live in a world where students were taught one on one, instead of in unruly classes of 30+,; and where unique opportunities like FRC could be available to every student who merely expressed some interest. The problem is, there just aren't enough resources for this, by a factor with multiple zeros in it. There are of course exceptions in some engineering rich communities, but in most cases the engineering mentors are a scarce resource for FIRST teams. NEMO's, teachers, and especially those with mechanical skills are an extremely valuable resource to teams and I don't want to minimize their critical importance in any way. But at the core of the FRC programs are the engineering mentors who have worked as engineers in the real world to engineer products for the real world. It is these folks that we need if we are to show our students first hand how engineers think, how engineers approach problems, and how engineers use engineering process to produce products that solve those problems. You can't do that from a book - you can't do it with a physics teacher - you can't do it with a college engineering student. You can only do it in a credible way (i.e. credible to a bright college bound student) with some real engineers and only by actually demonstrating the actual process first hand. This is what FRC is about.

IMHO it is this first hand side by side participation that causes a student to say "wait a minute, I like this stuff. This is what I want to do. Mom want's me to be a doctor and Dad wants me to be lawyer and I thought I wanted to be a pre-school teacher, but I see now that doing this Engineering thing is what I want to do with my life"

BTW not everyone would call it a success to change someone's life by having them choose Engineering over Law, Medicine, or Teaching. But FIRST subscribes to the view that it is the practices of engineering and the physical sciences that raise the overall standard of living of everyone; and individuals will be happiest in careers they will personally enjoy. FIRST is not trying to make everyone a scientist or engineer. FIRST is, however, trying to show what it's really all about so that our best and brightest can make an informed decision about choosing Engineering if that is really the best career for them. At the same time, it is certainly possible that some student with good mechanical ability might, through FRC participation, discover that real engineering (with heavy CAD, math, and physics) just isn't for them. I would also call that a success.

When you have a scarce resource you usually want to preserve it and use it in the most effective way. We consider it far more effective to use engineering mentors as actual engineers on the team and professional software engineers as actual software engineers on the FRC team, collaborating first hand with student that have the requisite level of maturity and skill to benefit from this experience. It is these kinds of students, mostly Jr's and Sr's that get the most out of working side by side with the engineering mentors on the project. Suitably prepared students get far more of what the FRC program is trying to deliver from working directly with engineers that are actually doing engineering than they would from engineers who are doing teaching.

The maturity level of High School students varies widely and so does their ability in math, physics, and programming. On a scale of increasing ability from 1 to 5, a student with maturity=1, math=1, programming =1, mechanical ability = 1 is unsuitable as a participating member an FRC team. It's not good for them. It's not good for the mentors, It's not good for the other students. It's not much different than other H.S. team sports in that regard. A student that doesn't know the rules of Basketball and has never played much Basketball usually isn't a very good candidate for the Varsity basketball team.

Nevertheless, in a couple of years the student that is now 1,1,1,1 may become 4,4,4,4 or more, especially with the experience and light mentoring they get through FTC participation. They can then end up with a life changing experience through FRC. So what we want to do is to attract and hook these students using FTC. We then use the FTC competition to build the interest, mechanical skills, pre-engineering skills, and team participation skills of these mostly Freshman and Sophomores teams to prepare them for later participation as Juniors and Seniors on the FRC team. The upperclassman students that lead the FTC teams also gain leadership experience and an appreciation for the fact that it takes serious people to get serious results.

We do select some Freshman and Sophomores for apprentice roles on the FRC team on a case by case basis. Our FRC team also includes students from other nearby high schools.

I do not propose that this approach is the only or best way. It depends on the resources available to your team. There are all student FRC teams, and heavily mentor driven FTC teams. But the FTC program as documented is basically a student driven program with light mentoring. In fact, as a coach of an FTC team your promise to the program includes:

1. The students come first. FTC is about the students having fun and getting excited about science and technology. Everything my team does starts and ends with this principle.

2. The students do the work. This is their opportunity to learn and grow. The students on my team do all programming, research, problem-solving, and building. Adults can help them find the answers, but cannot give them the answers or make the decisions.

3. My team is comprised of ten or fewer members registered as an official FTC team. All team members participate on only one team and all team members are pre-college students.

This contrasts with FRC where the TEAM is a collaboration of adult Engineers, High School Students, College Students, and NEMOS. The mentoring process in FRC is summed up by 4 steps:

I Do You Watch
I Do You Help
You Do I Help
You Do I Watch

As I pointed out in my original post, building and programming FTC robots is fun, safe, relatively easy, and amenable to self discovery and learning by failure. And we do mentor our FTC teams. But it is mostly with high school upperclassman and college engineering student mentors. We find that perhaps the most important thing that FTC does for our students is to build up their confidence that can actually create and build this mechanical stuff by themselves. This is something that often holds them back from engineering, especially the girls.

We would do things differently if we were FRC only and if we were FTC only. A big FRC robot is an impressive thing. It attracts students. What many of the students want to do is to just build the big robot themselves. Who needs mentors? But what we are trying to do with FIRST is to end up giving them something with a value that none of them have anyway of appreciating until they are long past the program.

The above is only my opinion and it is how we run our programs. We are not an "award winning" team. We have never received any award from FIRST. We measure success not by awards but by the number of students we mentor who have selected "Engineering" as their college major SOLELY as the result of their experience with our program.