The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Why do mentors get burned out? Because mentors have more than one passion, more than one obligation, and finite amounts of time and energy.

Yes!

I am not advocating teams/mentor spend more time on FIRST. I am advocating FIRST makes the time spent more valueable by allowing teams/mentors access to their competition robots.

Probably the most important thing that happened to us this season was getting eliminated in the quarter finals at Waterford. This gave us 3-4 hours of time to work on getting the climber strung and hooks installed. This time with the competition robot, without the pressure of having an up coming match was critical in discovering the issues that were holding us back from climbing. Without this time, I doubt we ever climb in the season.

If we would have advanced, we would have had to wait until Troy to install the parts on the competition robot. We would have then discovered we needed to change the hooks (again!) to get up to level 3. Depending on how far we got with the practice bot (it ended up falling off the tower btw Waterford and Troy, and had to be re-built). We may or may not have continued with the climber development. Knowing that the competition bot was close to climbing was what kept us moving forward.