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Unread 26-03-2010, 11:17
RandomStyuff RandomStyuff is offline
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FRC #2212 (Spikes)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Rookie Year: 2008
Location: Israel
Posts: 42
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Re: A mentor perspective on what happened in FIRST Israel

I'm not sure that going through the mentors is the correct way here. I know FIRST is partially about the students learning from the mentors, but I think that in every field where students can manage alone, it's even better. For example, in my team, we have 4 programmers who are all students, and a mentor which is half mechanical and half programming. In terms of mentoring us in the programming team he sits with the team and helps prioritize different goals (such as that it's more important to get our swerve drive system done than program our own event-based library) and goes over our code at the end to see that we have no errors. Now, maybe that's just our team, and I do realize that my school is not normal in that computer science is our expertise, but I really do believe that when possible, FIRST should be a student thing.
I think a better solution is rather than mentors teaching mentors which teach students having students teach students. I've already started getting the ball rolling on this with my school to try to organize this. I assume that if I do manage to get this up and running you will hear about it soon enough...
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