Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot. Does that mean there is nothing to be gained from that model, or that that is not an appropriate model for any team? No, of course not. But it does mean that there is something lost when you marginalize student involvement. It'd be nice if the atmosphere here were such that people could say this without inciting massive debates, because it's really not (or shouldn't be) a contentious claim.

This is a contentious topic because it's constantly presented as a straw man where teams have "teams of engineers building their robots" and students just driving it. This is not reality. In reality the teams (like 254) who get called out under that logical fallacy are trending towards or past 50% mentor/student work breakdown, not 99% mentor, 1% student.