Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[JamesCH95]

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.

It's a competition. Level playing fields only exist literally, not metaphorically.

If there is a single competition out there with a level playing field I'd love to see it. In every high-level competition the playing field is uneven. Sports teams have different budgets to recruit players; racing teams have different budgets for testing, consumables, and driver salary; Olympians from different countries have different levels of coaching skill and training facilities; companies have different budgets, resources, and facilities for developing their products. Life is not even, and FRC is a good object lesson for this.

If you are unhappy with your team's resource level, do whatever you can to improve it. A given team's situation can be improved, which is a superior alternative to bringing down other teams' capabilities with rules.