Mentors

[shyra1353]

Originally Posted by indieFan

Can you clearly define for me what you mean by "student-run"?

when i say "student run" i mean that all the management and everything is done by me .. our staff sponsor simply gives us his room to use at lunchtime for our lunchtime meetings and thats about it .. he is also our main contact for FIRST, but he just prints out all of the emails that he receives and gives them to me .. so we are in all sense a student-run team .. from your post i got the impression that you think that i am an adult .. i am still only a 15 year old junior in high school so i do not have all the skills that an adult does ...

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

There are two aspects to a FIRST team

one is the part of the team that is very much like a HS club, like a chess club or ski club. There are meetings to schedule, uniforms, public service - and many other considerations that bond the students together as a unit, as a club, as a team - these things should definately be 'run' by the students

the other part is the engineering aspect of the robot design and build cycle. Unless your HS students have earned BSEE and BSME degreees already, how can they lead or run an engineering team?

If we could throw a box of parts at HS students and let them build a robot on their own, and have them somehow discover what engineering careers are like, then FIRST wouldnt be going through all this trouble to find corporate sponsers and thousands of mentors.

I think letting the students run and control the club/team aspect is excellent. But to let the students think they can compete against teams that have adult engineeing mentors would be cruel and pointless - all you are doing is setting them up to fail - and then they will come to the conclusion that engineering is complicated, too hard for them, something they are not good at - in other words, they will decide engineering sucks!

i agree with you with pretty much all that you have said there .. we are at a major disadvantage to other teams because of this however all of the students on the team are interested in engineering and most of them have done some sort of engineering project in the past (even the freshmans) ... i have told them to not have any expectations for this season because it will be hard .. they know that engineering is a hard subject and thats why they are on the team .. for the challenge

as an update on the mentor situation .. i have found some mentors who are willing to mentor us and while some of the team disagrees with us having mentors ( some agree that we need them ) we are going to have them regardless because they are a necessity and i can only hope that within the next 2 weeks the part of the team that disagrees with mentors will come around to see why we need them and that they are not there to do everything for us .. and instead to guide us and help us when we are wrong