Getting Mentors out of Comfort zone

[Skyehawk]

I'm going to pull this thread back towards it's intended propose.

As a student from 2011-2014 on team 876; it was a real bummer when so many ideas of mine (and fellow teammates) got shot down, I always told myself that It would get better, as I got older that I would gain a higher degree of respect and recognition. While this was partially true, as in our mentor-centric team would actually hear my ideas out (and pay attention for that matter (2012 was a bad year)). My ideas never made it past the prototypes that I made. This was also true as far as programming went, every year- bare bones programming. Things eventually picked up in 2013-2014 as I stopped asking and just did.

My point being that students really never had a large say in what the robot would end up being. We don't do CAD, we only have vague ideas on what the robot will be, it's mostly build on the fly. Our lead building mentor has yet to build us a bad robot, but things are mostly done his way (not entirely, but mostly). There are plenty of times I wanted to try swerve, mecanum or slide, but I got shot down because "that's not how we do things" or "there has never been a mecanum bot on Einstein".

Now that I am a mentor I have caught myself exhibiting some of this "less desirable" behavior, don' t get me wrong, experience is good, but it is true that you learn more from failure than when you are handed success. I am now trying to port my projects over to students instead of trying to continue them myself (as much as I want to), and let them continue development of the ideas with my guiding input.

When it gets down to it: The best way out of this, in my honest opinion, is for the students to approach said mentor(s) as a group, explain the situation, and offer ideas to fix the problem. The solution may just be as easy as bringing it out into the open. Past that, work on mechanism that you brought up during the build season and impalement them onto the bot after the season, or a programming method, etc. If it works better than the previous solution the mentor(s) may see that your reasoning was right in the first place and be more open to ideas. If it doesn't work better, you just learned what not to do in that situation, no harm done.

I wish you luck,
-Skye