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

[dellagd]

While Im hesitant to weigh in on a thread like this (and my views don't necessarily reflect my team's ), someone a while back put this nicely.

With us, mentors basically function as students. Its quite a nice balance. Mentors are there to mentor, but Id say that doesnt really place them far above all the students on our team. We all work together, and while Ive learned alot from our mentors, and Im very thankful for that, Ive taught them a few things too, as well as our mentors learning from each other. Not all mentors are super experts. This segways (Ha...Ha ha... Segway ) into our brainstorming. I find it hard to believe that some teams automatically put their mentors ideas before the student's purely because it came from an adult. Most of the ideas our team is using came from students, and when they come up, are evaluated the same way as mentor's ideas. You have it, now explain its feasibility, function, ect. to us. I mess up on our team, but our mentor's arn't infallible either.

I believe I got this from Karthik's (Sorry if I butchered that) from 1114 strategy video. Dont take people's word on things. Get the explanation, and have it make sense before you accept it as fact. It will help you more in the long run anyhow if you know why or how something occurs.

I love it, getting to work alongside real world engineers, and while I believe that having the mentors completely out of the building, more as observers and guiders, there is something to be said for working with these great people. Guess what (and though this isn't the goal of being a mentor), mentors like FRC too, its really fun to go through an engineering process so fast and have a working model (hopefully) in only six weeks. Our mentors want to design, build, and succeed just as much as us students do. I hate to do say it with these words but...We're all in this together.