Mentor/Student/Parent interactions????

[Oode]

I'm a mentor on a rookie First team, and I was wondering if some of you might shed some historical light on your experiences and observations regarding how the balance of ideas and actions works with the mentors, students and parents involved in the designing and building of the robots.


Any comments or suggestions very welcome, it's getting to crunch time!!!!!!

TIA

[Joe Matt]

Our mentors provide vaulable techinical insight and the ability to look at a problem far away. Our ideas for our robot and our secret weapon came from our mentors and created by Gabe (ggoldman). We are brinnging them to Disney and VCU because there are bound to be some troubles.

We love and will do anything for them but lend money and anything illegal.

[Kris Verdeyen]

Our team has had an extraordinary amount of parental participation this year, with two parents coming to almost all the meetings. Seriously, that's a lot. For us.

But as far as team interaction and the balance of power goes, we (the engineers and parents) start out by going over the game with the students, and accentuating those salient features in the game that would lead to the conclusion that we think would work best. But then the students decide on some other way to play the game that they think would be better, and we build that.

Our teachers are, in large part, not that interested in the team, although there are several exceptions.

Some pay no attention to what's going on (40%), others ask us questions and appear interested, but never pick up a tool (50%), and one guy is about as gung ho as it gets. He's a shop teacher, and is very good at manufacturing things that are solid and precise. (As an electrical engineer, my manufacturing skills are somewhat sparse.)

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So it breaks down like this: (assume engineers, parents and interested teachers are lumped together under "engineers" below)

Strategy/Top level design parameters: Students as a whole, with engineers trying to influence, but being unsucessful

Low level design : Subsystem students and engineers (exact mix depends on the subsystem)

Manufacturing: Engineers with student support (NASA safety rules prevent students from operating bench tools)

Integration: Students with engineer support

Driving: Students with engineers cracking the whip (figuratively, of course: it's more of a crop than an actual whip).
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I'm also interested in the breakdown for other teams - please post, everyone!

[Matt Reiland]

We have three teams building this year in a shared area and as usual there is an extreme mix of what ideas should be used on the final robot. My personal experience is that each person wants thier ideas to be used but,they all can not be used, sometimes leading to hurt feelings. We seem to have a big problem on our team with ideas that either can't be produced or the design has obvious problems with such things as robustness. Even with these problems some people still want to try it and it takes up time and resources to do so. One of the teams is even building competing designs within the team and that leads to problems with resources when the robot needs to be finished. Teams need to use the mentors and engineers to help shed light on what will and will not work (mechanically and electrically), if the design is robust, and above all can it even be built, early on. That way you don't spend all of your precious time and resources working on an idea with no future.

Thats at least my take on it

[Jon Lawton]

Adult participation is vital to a team. I appreciate every contribution made by every individual ever involved with the team.

THAT SAID, I must point out that sometimes adults can get a little over-zelous. I've found that adults can whine and complain and pressure people and all that stuff just as much as the students can (if not more!). Like I said, I love our adult members, but somtimes they step out of line. It might be prudent to, on your team, make your lines well defined, and whack anyone (parent and student alike) with pieces of extrusion if they try cross them.

We have one parent who helps orginize and deal with the technical aspects of Chairman's Award stuff and other Public Realtions.

We have one parent who comes in to every meeting to help us build, and "realize" our designs.

We have one parent to does a LOT of our CAD for us, and gets them sent off to the machine shops for us.

We have a couple of other parents that drift in and out at random.

However you choose to structure your team: please please please keep in mind that communication between everybody involved is abosolutely VITAL. I can say that one from experence, and can not stress it enough. Best of luck to you and your team!