Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by bduddy

Here come the false equivalencies again. No one is arguing that teams should have minimal or no mentor involvement. Some people are arguing that some/many teams have too much mentor involvement.

Why do all of these threads inevitably turn into people arguing against a position that was never advanced?

Because we always bad mouth the teams that have "too much mentor involvement" (by some arbitrary metric that the poster decides) but I find the notion of student run teams, a topic that has been lauded by many on here as admirable, to be an abomination of the ideals and concepts of FIRST. There are many other competitions in which students do 100% of the work with limited mentor involvement, FRC is different. So I advanced the topic, because I've not seen any real discussion as to whether we should be as harshly critical to all student teams as people seem to be to "overly" mentored teams.

Are the two equal? No. One is, in my opinion, and according to many comments from FIRST HQ, doing FRC wrong. The other has mentors working with students.