Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Sam_Mills]

Originally Posted by ZackAlfakir

The goal is not to have a working robot, it is to have the STUDENTS build a working robot and a Mentor is one of the tools that they use to get to that goal.

No, your goal is to have the students build a working robot. The goal of FIRST is to inspire students. I say this having spent 4 years (as a student) on a team well known for being almost entirely student driven. It worked well for us, and I got a lot out of the program, but if other teams find that they can maximize inspiration in other ways, then more power to them. If you have mentors on your team capable of teaching programming to the level that your students can do all of it, you're very lucky.

A side note, of the teams you would consider "mentor built," competitive ones are extremely rare. Yes there are the perennial powerhouses, whose philosophies you may not agree with, but they are a tiny fraction of "mentor built" teams. Not only that, but the students do far more than you would expect on most of them. When I think mentor robot, I don't think powerhouse. I think dad-robot built by under-qualified adults unwilling to give students the reins, and unable to teach new skills.

Nobody complains about them because they don't often win. If you're truly looking to rescue students from the terrors of mentorship, don't try to rescue them from engineers from whom they may learn something.