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

[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