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

[Donut]

Originally Posted by dellagd

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.

If your mentors don't like FRC, I don't know why they would ever continue to be in it. It has to be fun and engaging for everyone on the team to keep it surviving. Just as a team with no students can't survive, a team without mentors to bridge between the generations of students won't either.

I don't really have a whole lot to add to this discussion, but I will mention that sometimes mentors get very involved in the design or build because they themselves are not yet at a point to mentor effectively. Just as an anecdotal example, all of the engineering mentors on the team I am currently with come from an Electrical, Computer, or Systems Engineering background. Since Mechanical Engineering is not in any of our backgrounds we're sometimes learning ourselves during build season, which obviously makes it more difficult to effectively teach this information to the students as well. Maybe that's an aspect I like about FRC as well though... I don't get to work on mechanical designs in my job, and doing so in FRC is a good way to continue learning.