Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[asid61]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

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.

Actually, could you name some of those student-run programs for me? I want to suggest some robotics programs to a few of the younger kids I know that aren't going to my HS, and I don't want to just tell them "FRC is the only one".