Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by bEdhEd

Powerhouse teams don't happen overnight. They had to work to that level too, regardless of who is involved.

QFT. Our team was started in 2001 as a partnership with BP, and it was 8 years before we won a regional. 8 years! That's when the 3000's teams were entering the fray. I see a lot of rookie teams getting discouraged, but sometimes all it takes is dedication, and years of experience to know what works and what doesn't.

I've been following this thread for a while, and thought I might give a student's perspective - especially meant for those who think that a good robot can't be built by students. Competitive robot =/= mentor built.

On my team, I have first-hand experience that the robot is fabricated by students. That does not, by any means mean our mentors are not involved. It's a joint effort to brainstorm, innovate, and design this vehicle. It's not designed by a sponsor or anything either; we cut every part and drill every hole by hand in our shop.

A lot of what makes teams good is a passion to improve and prove yourself. Our programming subteam doesn't have a mentor who is actually a programmer, let alone in LabView. We have some build mentors who help guide the functions and logic necessary, but when it comes to actually coding the robot, it's all on the students - thankfully, they are very self-motivated, working on code all the time, pretty much for fun. (One decided to make our current team website from scratch over the summer a year ago, and another programmer made an FRC statistics site, http://bbqfrc.x10host.com.) We've managed to win 5 Innovation in Control awards in the past three years, and really all I can attribute that to is the persistence of our programming team.

When we go to competition, we see teams with other robots, often times better than ours, but we never think - "Man, I wish ____ built or robot for us too." We take that and challenge ourselves to build a robot that can compete at the same level as those powerhouse teams, and we're getting there, thanks to the hard work of generations of mentors and students on our team. As a side note, I have worked personally with students from teams that routinely get accused of the "50+ mentor built robot syndrome" - they are just as knowledgeable, and I'm sure they were "inspired," since it seems we like to throw that word around a lot when talking about this subject.

In the end, I think that if a team wants to get better, they'll find a way to bring themselves up, rather than complain about what other teams have and don't have. It might take time, but it's worth the wait to build this program. Besides that, every student and on every team may be "inspired" in a different way from the other. There isn't much one can do about the teams whose programs you may not necessarily agree with, but the fact is you will have to live with it and move on.