Sippin' on the haterade

[Patrick Chiang]

Originally Posted by huberje

I just have two questions on this:

1) What top teams did you talk to to determine that a lot of top teams work by keeping their mentors hands-off?

2) Could you elaborate on how a team can utilize mentors well?

1. Well, a lot of top teams in my area are mentors-hands-off at competitions. You can go to the pits, and see that most people there are students. Of course, there are some teams where it's mentors-fix-everything at the pits, which I think is depriving the students the experience of actually doing things themselves under the pressure of competition.

2. This depends on the kids. In our team, mentors are resources. We teach our students how to use the tools (or how to program, in my case, though I'm passing that responsibility of teaching to the students next year) before the season. Then, when they brainstorm at the beginning of the season, we help them come up with a structure of how they should present and vote on their ideas (which they agree on). And when they build, they ask us questions like "how well do you think this will work" "what's the best way to achieve this" "I'm stuck, can you help me with this" ...etc. There's also cases where we've helped them used some power-tools, but overall, the robot belongs to the kids. In the end, they're extremely proud (and inspired) of this little monster they've created, and I think this is a big part about FIRST. A big part that you can't really get when the mentors are building the robot.

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Patrick,
Many teams do that because it is one way to limit the number of students that can be included for teams with limited resources.

Yes. I realized that a while after I posted that. Read my last post on why that's not the same thing. Students can choose how much time they put into robotics. On the other hand, they can't choose which team to join.