Mentor Roles

[Knufire]

Different teams have different approaches to the subject.

When I was a student, my high school's team preached the interaction between mentors and students. We were all considered equal members of the team, and each contributed as much to the overall product as they could. I found this to be extremely rewarding, where other students and I were presented with enough work and responsibility to challenge ourselves, but never felt restricted in what the team could accomplish through our inexperience.

On the team I mentor now, things are very different and a similar process doesn't work quite as well. There are a number of reasons why: number of mentors, team age, socionomic differences between the two cities, etc. What I've learned that if a student is adament on something, you can't/shouldn't stop them. Yes, they need help, but that help is going to be much more well recieved when they're willing to listen. Some just have to learn the hard way.

However, if they claim that mentors are not part of the team, they're absolutely wrong. Mentorship is one of the principles first is based around, what differs it from traditional STEM education. Engineers' time is valuable, and sometimes students need to be gently reminded that engineers (espeically those with lots of industry experience) giving them free time and effort is a great learning opportunity, and that they should be treated with the respect that they deserve.

There are teams that pride themselves on being a 100% student built effort. I personally think this is the wrong way to go. For your scenario specifically, I would suggest trying to get them to slow down for a meeting. Stop working on the robot for an hour and analyze where the project currently is, where you're trying to make it go, and plan a general schedule of how you're going to get there with the remaining time, offering your experience as a guide to estimating how long the various portions left (design, manufacturing, assembly, etc.) may take. This activity might help the students realize that they might be overestimating exactly how much there is left to do or how long there is left to do it.