At what point does it become unacceptable for a mentor to design/build the robot

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Kusha

they don't take into consideration or even test students ideas.

Students should be testing their own ideas, not handing them off to mentors.

For some teams, the mentors need to be very involved. For other teams, they almost don't have mentors. Most teams lie between those two extremes, and as long as everyone is OK, it is OK. When someone doesn't like it, they need to change it democratically.

So in our hypothetical team where some students felt their ideas were being ignored, first advise the mentors of those feelings, and try to see how it can be addressed.

Students need to understand that mentors are unlikely to take any cockamamie ideas that students throw at them and make them work - that takes way too much effort. Instead, the student has an idea, they get reasonable resources to develop and test it, with the mentors offering verbal advice when a roadblock is hit.

I had a student approach me with an idea for lifting up frisbees, and I quote "well, the frisbees get in here somehow and are lifted up somehow and pop into some kind of hopper." Great idea, but still needs some more effort, because a 5 year old could've come to that conclusion. The devil is in the details - come back with a working prototype and we can talk.

No J.W., I am not referring to you.

[Seth Mallory]

Another issue is training time. If a team forms before build then the mentors are more involved in the robot as this is the only time to teach. We have our students all year in a engineering program and so we can mentor before build. There is no way you can compare the two different styles. You have to do the best with what you have. Both systems produce great students. Also some teams focus on the robot and some on the students. Each system produces good results depending on the mentors and students involved. What works for my team will not work for many other teams.

[ctccromer]

I think our coach handles it perfectly. He basically acts like another student when it comes to brainstorming: suggesting anything that pops in his head or helping out here and there with some new ideas. But nothing more than any of the rest of us provide. I (note: not we. This is just my thoughts) feel like our coach does a great job of being part of the team, but not taking over at all.

A great example. Today we were discussing climbing plans and he said "Y'all are welcome to override me, but if I were a dictator or a one man team, what I would do is..." and gave us his opinion. Then went on to say "but y'all decide what you think is best and that's what we're gonna do." Providing ideas but not shoving them down our throats seems to work really well

[RRLedford]

I find that one of the most overlooked aspects of this whole discussion is the very extreme time window compression of the FRC build season.

Clearly, there is not a whole lot of time that can be wasted trying out some of the student ideas that a mentor may clearly instantly see is frankly unworkable. It often seems heavy handed when ongoing arguments over opposing design concepts finally get decided by a unilateral mentor decision, and without any student-expected "fair test."

I sometimes feel like the compressed time window prevents a lot of learning experiences from happening, just as much as it may create some too.

There is a lot of pressure on mentors to have a build season end with some sense of accomplishment. When mentors see that the focus of team efforts is going in a bad direction that is destined to fail, they feel obligated to right the ship. Often this leads to them taking too much control and doing too many things that students could still handle, if they were more skillfully redirected toward the more potentially successful direction.

Students can then start feeling left out of the process. It is a real balancing act to have students being responsible for things that they have had zero prior experience doing, and at the same time knowing that there is really not enough time to deliver to them the background knowledge and training that may be required to complete many tasks.

So as the time crunch pulls a team ever closer to the event horizon of bag day, mentors may often seem like they start drifting away from doing as much mentoring, in the manner that students expect them to, and seem to start taking on too much of the job, to the point of excluding students from too much of the process.

However, understand that it is the mentor's strong commitment toward realizing the extended team's goals - students, parents, administrators - that is the primary factors that triggers this kind of mentor-doing-too-much behavior.
This still doesn't mean it is a good thing, but it does make it easier to understand how and why it happens.

I personally feel the the very short time window of the build season of FRC seriously undermines the level of good mentoring that I can accomplish with my team, and forces me to be doing way to many things that I would rather have them be doing, but time simply does not allow that.

-Dick Ledford

[Akash Rastogi]

The best way to avoid these discussions on CD is by teams learning their own team dynamic and discussing it with students, teachers, and mentors together.

The better the students understand the mentors' motives and actions, the better they react. Usually this means more rational reactions and less irrational threads on CD (Not that Kusha is an example of this). When mentors understand students' concerns, they learn how to better react to farfetched ideas in a method that is more conducive to the student being inspired/learning from the mentor.

It really boils down to team communication that happens before build season. Open discussion and everyone understanding how the team runs/how they want it to run is what makes or breaks a student's reactions to these types of scenarios.

+.02 based on experience from the past season and offseason. Kusha, feel free to PM me or chat on facebook about my team's experience with these issues.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by RRLedford

I personally feel the the very short time window of the build season of FRC seriously undermines the level of good mentoring that I can accomplish with my team, and forces me to be doing way to many things that I would rather have them be doing, but time simply does not allow that.

-Dick Ledford

I agree completely. It seems we're in the same boat. Student acquisition of skills takes a LOT of time. We started pre-season prep in the summer, and it still isn't enough. In the build season, the competitive teams that will win this are not doing hardly anything new. They are already experts, and are simply repeating things they have done in the past. They innovate in the offseason, and apply minor tweaks during build season. If you're trying much of anything new starting in January, you have already lost the game.

This build season has been particularly tough. Already, I have over 230 hours into it personally. As a team, we have over 3000 people-hours into it total so far.

There are plenty of things I wish I could take the time to show students how to do for the first time, but the harsh reality is that if I did, it would be February 19th and we wouldn't have anything close to resembling a robot sitting here (we still may not anyhow!). Sometimes one has to consider the greater good. Whch is better: students involved in every step an the robot is a terrible failure, or a reasonable dose of mentor involvement and the kids have something adequately field-able? While it's not about the robots, a terrible robot can ruin any team's morale. I refuse to allow it to happen here. Failure is not an option.

In my opinion, a team needs to best utilize ALL of its people. If an adult has knowledge or skills or abilities that can benefit the team as a whole, it's doing the team a disservice to hold that back.

While currently I may do too much work for my students, they are all aware of my goal to be sitting back in a La-Z Boy recliner with my feet up on my desk and a cool beverage in my hand within the next 5 years, and several students are making progress toward helping me achieve that goal. (This is a fictional goal by the way. I don't think I'll ever be a hands-off mentor. It's just not my style).

[austinious]

Almost all of the time it depends on the student. I have a great pair of seniors who can build most anything. They presented me with a frame plan and a CAD drawing and I made some minor suggestions, and then they made it... alone.

The shooter group, on the other hand, has me do most hands on work, even when I insist they do it.

The other groups are a mixed bag, sometimes you need to stop an action in progress, like the first year member using one of my classroom desks to pound a gear onto a shaft... don't ask...

Other times, there just isn't time. Last year a support strut broke in between matches, as I watched the confusion and repair attempts, I KNEW I had to step in and take over, or all was lost. I felt bad afterwards, but the team congratulated me. To quote the outgoing leader, "sometimes experience trumps enthusiasm."

Ask yourself this, should I have let them fail to repair the strut and forfeit several matches? What purpose would that serve?

[Taylor]

This is a struggle - one that many old farts still have.
This is my eighth season in FRC, and it made me cringe when on the first Monday the students were saying, "I like Taylor's idea. Let's go with Taylor's idea."
The thing was, the way we chose to approach this game was decided by the team. The strategies we'll employ were decided by the team. And when I say 'team' I mean students - I only acted as a scribe on the chalkboard. "Taylor's idea" was simply a way to realize that strategy.
Since then, it has been refined and massaged and manipulated, mostly by students, into a workable solution.
I suppose my tl;dr is this: Ideas are ideas. They're not property. Once they're out, they're not owned by anybody. So if you feel your mentors are hijacking your team, make a concerted effort to stick your nose in, work shoulder-to-shoulder, make yourself a part of the process. If they deny you that, demand an explanation.

[Leor Buch]

Originally Posted by austinious

Ask yourself this, should I have let them fail to repair the strut and forfeit several matches? What purpose would that serve?

I think what you did was completely acceptable.
In my opinion alumni and mentors are a resource to be used in furthering the students learning and inspiration. this means to me that students should be free to ask any questions on the plausibility of their ideas. on the other hand I think the students benefit the most from being led to the solution rather than just being told.

in 2009 the students in my team chose an idea the mentor was opposed to. this was also the first year the robot was mostly designed before being constructed.
After a lot of argument our mentor he eventually came over to the student's side and ended up giving them vital assistance.
I guess I'm just agreeing with the majority that balance is what is most important. Just that mentors and alumni have more responsibility for how the team looks in the long term.

[Robogineer1649]

There is not necessarily an universal answer that answers for every team how much of the robot should be mentor built and how much of it should be student built.

That being said i will explain our mentor/student philosophy and i will state that i am a very large advocate for student built robots halfway because this is how our team does it and halfway because I believe if it is a student built robot the students will learn a lot more than just watching the mentors. Additionally the reason i want to become a mechanical engineer and a roboticist is that i was able to build a robot and actually see the entire design process and participate in it starting from stating my strategy all the way to making the bumpers at the end of the season and mounting the electronics.

Team 1649's policy is that mentors are only there to guide and teach the students and answer questions. They are also there to make sure someone doesn't cut there hand off or something else that doesn't grow back. So basically mentors are there to make sure we don't kill each other or ourselves and teach us how to build the robot. This being said the mentors are not in a glass box and all they do is answer questions and then sit back down. Normally the mentors are there and will answer any question you have but they also move around to the different projects we are working on and they will advocate safety or ask questions and suggest ways to do something better. Also the mentors will voice their opinions and tell us when where not doing something right or suggest a way to do it better but the students are still the ones building the actual robot. This is our team philosophy and our main mentor follows this team philosophy very closely with the only exceptions to this being a alumni mentor teaching us how to do CAD while cadding components for this year's robot.

The last thing i want to say is that this is our team philosophy and i just wanted to share it and it may work very well on our team but it may not work for other teams. Such as teams where the machining tools can only be used by mentors or chaperones.

[rsegrest]

Originally Posted by austinious

The other groups are a mixed bag, sometimes you need to stop an action in progress, like the first year member using one of my classroom desks to pound a gear onto a shaft... don't ask...

Off topic but...happened in my shop two days ago...just saying

Glad I'm not the only one yelling across the room 'bad idea in action...'

[darkember]

Speaking from my team's experience, the students are the ones who design, build, and test everything. What we as mentors try to do is help the students better understand why somethings work and others don't. We help them with learning the fundamentals of how things are created. As a former team member and now a mentor I feel like it is the students who should be doing the work and the mentor is there to guide them. If mentors were to take the aspect of robotics that students enjoy the most we would be missing the whole idea of FIRST, which is to inspire students in the fields of math and science through application

[runneals]

Kusha and others,
I agree with Libby. There is something interesting I have observed while participating in FLL and my time so far in FRC this year (this is my first year in FRC). I wish EVERYONE would have a professional mentor like my FLL mentor who is an engineer at a large agricultural company here in Iowa. He is one of the few that lead by posing questions for us students to answer. I envision FTC to be kind of the same way as FLL since everything is pretty much plug and play. But when it comes to FRC, this is a much more complicated challenge that teams are only given 6 weeks to solve. If you don't like how something is done, don't be afraid to speak up. I encourage you to try to get your team members to start leading instead of the mentors, and once you have team member ownership and leadership, the team can adjust along the scale as they see fit. Another option is to try to join a youth organization like 4-H where we actually encourage this kind of learning and youth-adult partnerships.

Hope this helps and good luck!
David

[Astrokid248]

I'm gonna say something that will probably be hilariously controversial, but here it goes:

As a student on a team that is supposed to build robots, you need to build a robot. Even on a team with 90% mentor-driven design and build, you as the student have a responsibility to try and learn from these guys. I feel like my time as a student in FRC was productive because I grabbed the bull by the horns and forced my way into the design and build process. Taking the initiative and actively showing the mentors of a team that you want to BUILD ROBOTS is the only way to move beyond simple inspiration. I have seen too many teams accused of being mentor-driven when the problem is actually students not participating. Sure, it would be ideal if the mentors could just teach and not actually do any hands on design/building, but let's face it: you'd have to extend the season by about 4 weeks to make that happen.

So, my opinion is, it is always acceptable for the mentors to work on the design and build of the robot, as long as they aren't actively pushing students away. It is always unacceptable as a student to just throw up your hands and not try to help out. This argument is a 2-way road, double-edged sword, etc., but just blaming the mentors helps nothing.

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

For some teams, the mentors need to be very involved. For other teams, they almost don't have mentors. Most teams lie between those two extremes, and as long as everyone is OK, it is OK. When someone doesn't like it, they need to change it democratically.

Yeah, what Don said !!

This is an old thread in a new bottle. Teams ( student/mentors ) need to have an understanding of what success looks like. Having a winning robot is fun, but not necessarily success.

Teams need to have an understanding of what the off-season accomplishes in order to be ready for the on-season.

Knowing what success looks like, what you are trying to accomplish and focusing on that will help a lot. Solving team dynamics problems (forming, storming, norming, performing) before the on-season before kickoff helps a lot.

Team goals just collided with team dynamics !!

This is my 8th year doing this and we have had years with maybe 75% mentor involvement, 50%, 25%, and now about 1%. Next year will be maybe 33%. If we can keep it to 20 or 30% over the long haul I will be happy with that.

It is really nice getting things to the place to where the mentors can step forward or backward into the process as necessary.