Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Frankly, if I had a student that spent their entire fine with the team doing robot build activities and then decided she wanted to go into theatre, I would feel like I failed that student. It's not my job to turn every student into an engineer. Rather, it's my job to show them the options and nurture their interests so they can be successful in their career path. Honestly, there are very few career paths out there that can't have a start with a well organised FIRST team.

This is one of the silliest posts I've read on here. Just because a student pursues something outside of STEM doesn't mean a mentor didn't inspire them. Also, you make it sounds like a student going into what they are passionate about is a bad thing. I'd rather have a kid go into what they love and learn from robotics that engineering isn't what they want rather than go in, try, fail, be miserable, and quit.

Not all of us go into engineering, but we recognize the role of STEM in society and earn a greater level of respect for it through this program.

Signed - a former captain, mentor, team founder, Econ/Prelaw major.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

This is one of the silliest posts I've read on here. Just because a student pursues something outside of STEM doesn't mean a mentor didn't inspire them. Also, you make it sounds like a student going into what they are passionate about is a bad thing. I'd rather have a kid go into what they love and learn from robotics that engineering isn't what they want rather than go in, try, fail, be miserable, and quit.

Not all of us go into engineering, but we recognize the role of STEM in society and earn a greater level of respect for it through this program.

Signed - a former captain, mentor, team founder, Econ/Prelaw major.

I don't think that's what he meant. It was referring to the student spending their time doing a task on the team that didn't align with what they wanted to do after high school. If they wanted to go into theater then they could have helped with chariman's award scripts or the like.

I agree however that it is a bit silly. As I said earlier, just because a student majors in Theater doesn't mean they didn't want to work with tools and build robots while they were on the team.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Frankly, if I had a student that spent their entire fine with the team doing robot build activities and then decided she wanted to go into theatre, I would feel like I failed that student.

This is a very dangerous line especially for someone like me who didn't pursue a degree in STEM but was active on a team for three years and has helped run a team from the ground up for the past five years all primarily in the mechanical portions of the robot.

Every student can benefit from being in FIRST in more ways than just getting them into a STEM major. Even just being an outlet to gain confidence, make friends, and learn what team work is really about is more than enough reasons for me to stay involved with students. For some students just being there and showing an interest in them leaves more of an impact than sending them off to college for a degree in STEM.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

This is a very dangerous line especially for someone like me who didn't pursue a degree in STEM but was active on a team for three years and has helped run a team from the ground up for the past five years all primarily in the mechanical portions of the robot.

Every student can benefit from being in FIRST in more ways than just getting them into a STEM major. Even just being an outlet to gain confidence, make friends, and learn what team work is really about is more than enough reasons for me to stay involved with students. For some students just being there and showing an interest in them leaves more of an impact than sending them off to college for a degree in STEM.

Please read my above post. Jon's statement is being taken way out of context.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Please read my above post. Jon's statement is being taken way out of context.

But why does that student have to be shown the door to awards?

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Libby K

Another example we're working through right now - we're having a programming problem, and I want it fixed yesterday so our drivers can practice. One of our mentors knows how to fix it, so am I just going to let the students flounder around the issue and waste precious build season time? Of course not - that doesn't help anyone. We fix the issue immediately, and then the mentor who knew the solution spends the time to teach the students how he got around it (after the robot's functional, because ain't nobody got time for that right now).

We've done something similar with our coding this year. In order to get driver practice going as early as possible, we had a compiled "mentor code" jar and an associated script on the roboRIO that would let us swap in code one of the mentors wrote for driver practice, then go back to the student written code while the programming team was working. This way, we could easily drive the robot when needed so the drive team could be successful, while still allowing the programming team to tackle and overcome the challenge of doing the work themselves (with mentor assistance, of course).

In another incident, we were having a horrible time two years ago getting the built in PID controller to control our arm and stop oscillating. After several hours of banging our heads against the wall, I stepped in and wrote a quick controller we could use instead, and that would be much more intuitive for the students to tune. Then when the programming team had to be hands off the robot for a bit, I spent a solid half hour teaching them with a white board how the controller works and how I came up with it. Like you said, sometimes you just need to get things working, as a team, and worry about the education portion of things a little later.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

But why does that student have to be shown the door to awards?

They don't. But he is not saying that a student not majoring in STEM is a failure. He's saying that he feels that if a student spent their time doing something on the team instead of doing something that could have benefited them more because that's what they were planning on doing after high school e feels he has failed that student.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Like you said, sometimes you just need to get things working, as a team, and worry about the education portion of things a little later.

OK, I admit it, last night I commandeered the band saw and the cordless drill for a few minutes.

I'm lucky, the students let me work on the robot every now and then. So I keep coming back year after year.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

This is one of the silliest posts I've read on here. Just because a student pursues something outside of STEM doesn't mean a mentor didn't inspire them. Also, you make it sounds like a student going into what they are passionate about is a bad thing. I'd rather have a kid go into what they love and learn from robotics that engineering isn't what they want rather than go in, try, fail, be miserable, and quit.

Not all of us go into engineering, but we recognize the role of STEM in society and earn a greater level of respect for it through this program.

Signed - a former captain, mentor, team founder, Econ/Prelaw major.

Originally Posted by BrendanB

This is a very dangerous line especially for someone like me who didn't pursue a degree in STEM but was active on a team for three years and has helped run a team from the ground up for the past five years all primarily in the mechanical portions of the robot.

Every student can benefit from being in FIRST in more ways than just getting them into a STEM major. Even just being an outlet to gain confidence, make friends, and learn what team work is really about is more than enough reasons for me to stay involved with students. For some students just being there and showing an interest in them leaves more of an impact than sending them off to college for a degree in STEM.

Missed the entire point of my post. I'm not saying that students who leave a team to pursue non-STEM careers are bad. I'm not saying that STEM is for everyone. I'm not saying that the only inspiration that can happen on a team is STEM related. I'm not saying that non-technical individuals can only help with awards.

What I'm saying is that FIRST teams are about more than just the robot. As mentors, it's not our job to try to railroad students into STEM careers or focus solely on the build aspects of the team. You need to take the time to get to know your students, recognize what their passions are and what they enjoy, and then spend your effort to try to tailor the program for each and every one of them.

The whole point of FIRST is that we have a culture where kids are bombarded with actors, athletes, and music stars. That's what they see, that's what they know about the adult world, and thus that's what many of them aspire to. A FIRST team has the ability to show them something else. We can show them professional engineers solving problems. We can show them a finance master running the books for an annual budget worth more than the cost of the first car they'll drive. We can show them a marketing genius that reveals a whole world of calculated branding that has been right in front of them their entire lives. And a whole lot more.

If a kid joins the team, great. If they want to work on the robot, great. But if they find it's not really what they want to do, help them do something else that they can be passionate about, and help them understand where that activity can lead them in the future. With everything a team can do and work on, it's so much more than just the robot.

[Nate Laverdure]

Like Akash, I'm probably in the minority in that I'm one of those alumni whose FIRST experience had no impact on their career choice-- I've always known I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. (Actually that's not quite true; at six I wanted to be a bus driver and at seven I wanted to be a great white shark.) I didn't fully realize until college, however, that mechanical engineering is a huge field. It's been called the "liberal arts of engineering" because of the variety of subjects it contains beneath its umbrella. I'll admit to a little bit of panic when my university asked me to pick between a couple different specialties.

I was able to look back on my my experience working alongside my FRC mentors to figure out what kind of mechanical engineer I want to be. It was easy to figure out: I want to be a mechanical engineer that does the kinds of things that my mentors could do. I want to be a mechanical engineer that:
-- does work that makes a positive impact on the world
-- can communicate technical and nontechnical ideas to a diverse team of people who all think in a different way than I do
-- can have working relationships with people outside my peer group
-- can also lead a team of my peers

This is how FIRST's inspiration mechanism worked in my life. It was a process that moved so slowly, I couldn't see it happening until I reached a point where I could look retrospectively back at it. Maybe it's happening in the background of your life, too-- but it requires you to make decisions that allow it to happen.

Using choice-of-major as a success metric for inspiration is short-sighted. Real life is much more nuanced and interesting than that.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

They don't. But he is not saying that a student not majoring in STEM is a failure.

I didn't imply this is what he said. I said that it doesn't make the mentor a failure.

[mentorDon]

I don't have a problem with mentors helping students. You could bring every NASA engineer as far as I'm concerned. My problem is with NASA or other large corporations supplying the manufacturing time and materials for some of these robots. I wrote a letter last year to First expressing my thoughts about these $1,000,000 robots. If the rules were changed so that all materials and manufacturing time were included in the cost of the robot, that would level the playing field for all teams. Time to eliminate the free ride from major sponsors.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by Chinske4296

It is also frustrating to see teams videos of them working and you see more mentors working on the robot than students, or a Chairmans video with 1 student shown the whole time and about 15-20 different mentors.

If you know a team that has a 20:1 mentor-to-student ratio, you should give me their contact information right now. Recruiting mentors is one of the hardest things for teams to do well. Right now, my team is at about 1:4 mentor-to-student ratio, and we are the envy of many nearby teams. I even know teams that have a 1:20 ratio. So if there is a team out there that is 400 times better at recruiting mentors, they are clearly doing a much better job at running their program than any team I know, and I would like to learn everything I can about why they are so successful.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by mentorDon

I don't have a problem with mentors helping students. You could bring every NASA engineer as far as I'm concerned. My problem is with NASA or other large corporations supplying the manufacturing time and materials for some of these robots. I wrote a letter last year to First expressing my thoughts about these $1,000,000 robots. If the rules were changed so that all materials and manufacturing time were included in the cost of the robot, that would level the playing field for all teams. Time to eliminate the free ride from major sponsors.

You don't need NASA to have insane machining resources. In fact, there are plenty of teams who have better free machining sponsors who have a ton more machines at their disposal. I see many of them squander those resources on poor robot designs anyway. If you want, I will gladly help you find your own machining resources.

[The_ShamWOW88]

Is this happening again?

What works for your team works for you.