Reaching Critical Mass

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

I think this is a pretty difficult thing for many people to do, perhaps especially younger mentors. Expressing disappointment is only effective, in my opinion, when the students actually respect you. I know a few young mentors my age who can't use this tactic because the students don't respect them. I was lucky enough to have very respectful students, so it wasn't an issue for me, but what about when a mentor isn't respected by the students?

Might be a topic for another thread, but how do you get students to respect you? What might be some causes of this? Is it strictly because of the young age? Is it just on a student by student case?

If you act like a student, people will treat you like a student. This is particularly a problem for college mentors that don't take a break. All you've ever really known is being a student (even if you were a lead student), and so I think they really don't know how to act when they start mentoring. When they realize they are acting like a student, they try too hard and overcompensate and then no one wants to hear what you have to say.

All mentors are not created equal -- there is always a hierarchy (And this goes for any organization). Realize you are starting on the bottom. If you want to be top dog that's awesome, but you're going to have to work and earn your way to the top. I get the impression that this bites some young mentors that switch from a relatively successful team to one that is perhaps more up and coming. If you've got knowledge to share, that's great and should help you move up the ladder but if you try and hold the process hostage you're probably going to get burned.

Worth noting that I haven't actually done much mentoring myself, but I did work at a lot of summer camps with kids that weren't much younger than me and have watched a bunch of other people go through this process, so YMMV.

[MysterE]

Hi all,

I wanted to give a brief update and then ask a question along these same lines. First, I am proud to say that we have what seems to be our first functioning leadership council with eight students. Our President took it upon herself to begin planning our meetings and they all seem excited to engage their own tasks.

With that in mind, I noticed that we all seemed to flounder at our new members meeting today especially when it came to conveying what we do as an organization. To be honest, I had a fellow teacher approach one of my students at our demonstration yesterday and ask while watching our students driving and showing off last season's robot "So all you really do in robotics is play?"

Any suggestions as to now to convey something as complicated as a FRC team to new members?

[Jon Stratis]

A couple of thoughts for your latest question:

- What you're looking for here is an elevator speech, and it's not necessarily easy to come up with one. In the past, we've sat down with the entire team to work on them, having each student develop their own based on their own experiences, deliver it, and then talk as a team about what the best aspects of each speech is. In general, our elevator speeches start with a summary of FIRST, and then move into our team and history. With this type of speech, you want the most important information in the first 30 seconds, and then you basically keep going more and more in depth for as long as the audience is interested.
- Driving the robot around is the "cool" portion of the new member meeting. Before we do that with our students, we talk about the robot. Basically, pretend the students are judges at a competition, and you need to tell them all about your robot. Have the returning members talk about how it works, what parts they designed and built. That will help get the engineering aspect of the program across. It sounds like the teacher you mentioned missed that connection, and thought you just got a robot and drove it around! Keep in mind, the game is only important as it describes the task you designed the robot for - don't dwell on it! The important thing is the robot itself.
- A speech won't help anyone to truly understand what goes into an FRC team. During our two week long summer camp this year, we held a mousetrap car competition that was essentially a mini build season + competition for the students. It got them doing some actual engineering to solve a fairly simple task, talking about their car and how they designed it, and even experiencing multiple "matches" with breaks in between to fix/improve their cars. At the end, we could tell the 7 rookie members that they just went through their first build season, and that the actual build season was just a more intense version (and when we said that, the returning members said "oh wow, you're right!"). Describing the whole thing here is probably too much, but if you want to know more, message me with your e-mail address and I'll send over a full description plus some of our materials.


Of course, all of this is targeted at the engineering design/build aspect of a team, and we all know that teams are much more than just building a robot. However, I would recommend focusing first on this aspect and your discussion of it. Once that is on solid footing, you can afford to turn some of your attention towards the other aspects of a team, like community outreach.