Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Siri

One, I think you're exactly right. And two, the bolded statement blows my mind. For those of you not yet playing at home, the legendary HoF Team 842 did this:

2003 - SoCal Delphi Award & Semifinalists
2004 & 2005 - Arizona EI
2005 - World Championship EI
2006 - Arizona Chairman's, Worlds Chairman's HM
2007 - Arizona Finalists & Chairman's, Las Vegas EI
2008 - Hall of Fame, Championship Division Finalists, Las Vegas Finalists, Arizona Chairman's & Safety & Semis, Los Angeles & Las Vegas Entrepreneurship
2009 - Arizona Judges' & Safety
2010 - Las Vegas Creativity & Semis, Arizona GP & Semis

...without an engineering mentor.

With so many stories of current struggle, there are others who did in fact make it. Oh, and sometimes those guys end up with a feature-length movie about them starring George Lopez and Jamie Lee Curtis.

We often felt like we were Team 842 in many ways with respect to the hardships, socio-economic background of our community and focuses early on in our program. We went through a long period of not having an engineering mentor on our construction team as well (I dont count myself as an engineer even with the degree). Our only engineering mentors today are young former students with respect to designing and building the robots with our students.
Team 842 provides many examples of how to build your program with great successes vs. the amount of resources they had to work with.