Quote:
Originally Posted by JVN
Our team is run 50/50 with mentors and students working hand in hand on ALL aspects of the season. We've found when students get to work as peers with "real" engineers, magic happens. This really allows our students to get the most out of the FIRST experience.
-John
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Another requote of this.
(Sorry for the long post)
My high school's team (23) was run this way. Our mentors would split into 2 or 3 groups with the top ideas from the student brainstorming (chosen by the students) and they would start doing the math and building prototypes. Showing the students the
process of design is really important. We would bring our prototypes up to the "Driving by RC" stage wherever possible, then whichever one seemed to be working better would be chosen. We often didn't settle on a design until sometime week 3, but all the major dimensions and materials would have been figured out and tested by then.
My senior year, we were at the wiring stage, and one of the mentors sat down with me, wire strippers, and a crimper, and said "tell me what you want me to do". I was the only student interested in electronics that year, and we didn't have an electrical mentor, so he couldn't help design anything, but he could assemble anything I asked for (to leave me free for programming). I would have enjoyed helping route wires that year, but we simply didn't have time.
I have worked with mentors since then that are the "hands off, let them ask questions" type, which would keep themselves amused with non-robotics work while waiting to be asked a question. The students never wanted to interrupt what they were doing, so they never asked those questions.
I also agree with GaryVoshol. The students need to see the process to ask questions about it. My favorite question as a mentor is "why can't/don't we X?". That's the perfect time to learn what the student is thinking, and take a 10 minute diversion into the math about how the new system would work, compare it to the old, them let them help decide if we should change plans.
Towards the end of the season (when everything is behind schedule), I like to make a list of what all the students are working on, then suggest to them the items that are not
strictly needed, but have become a "nice to have" to help them prioritize the remaining build time. (Things like wheel encoders and accelerometers, which are helpful for a better autonomous, but won't help the robot drive when it doesn't have the rest of the drive code yet)