Mentors

[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!

[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

[Amanda Morrison]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

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!

As a team with no adult engineering help, I'd like to think that this type of team is very possible. I don't believe that a team without the availability of adult engineers is 'cruel and pointless' by any means, and if anything, motivates the students to learn more about the subject to compete effectively.

Teams that are run by students are not necessarily destined to fail. Just because a team does not have mentors of its own does not mean that other teams cannot intervene and help. There are many successfully run student-led teams, and there are success stories from all over. While you are correct in saying that students should be in charge of the organizational matters of the team, a team is not being set up for failure in the instance that they do not have adult mentors.

No team in FIRST fails, engineerless or plentiful.

[KenWittlief]

there are many ways and degrees of failure for a FIRST team.

one I have (unfortunately) seen several times is a team that either cannot get their bot to run at all, cant get it to pass inspection, or they could not ship it by the deadline - remember the placebo bot from previous years?

its devistating to the students on a team if they goto a regional and there bot doent move in any of its matches

another level of failure would be if the students have great ideas, but are unable to implement any of them, because they dont have the knowhow - Ive said before, the technology we use in FIRST is not leading edge state of the art, its scraping edge :c) - but even still, if the students can implement their ideas they will only become frustrated, not inspired.

Over the years I have seen more and more help from one team to another - I believe you could post a request on CD to have someone write all your SW for you, or to design a 6 speed auto shifting tranny for you, and someone would step up and do it for your team

and I have seen teams completely rebuild another teams robot for them on thursday at a regional

but then, you DO have mentors helping you, they just arnt officially a part of your team - If a team is willing to accept help then you dont have to yell very loud - its available from all directions.

[Redhead Jokes]

Originally Posted by shyra1353

i think that my team does not know what they are getting themselves into .. i know that some of them are in it just to build the robot and not for the overall experience, and i am hoping that kickoff will change that ... but i do not want a Battlebots team because i am in it for the experience and not the robot ...
i dont want my team to "waste" a year because we do not have mentors ..

2001 our team was student run, very crazy stuff going on, a student who built a robot on his own, the rest of the team building a robot that didn't make it to the competition. National championship won that year.

2002 a lot of division and fighting.

2003 2 families teamed up to make sure the program didn't die. Lots more mentors showed up. Lots of wonderful huge steps for our team in so many many ways.

A student this year is so inspired by a mentor, that on his own he's pursuing the Woodie Flowers Award for the mentor. That mentor has inspired others on the team, to join in on the nomination.

I don't think it'll be a waste of a year for your team. It'll be part of the journey. It will be a learning experience. There was a rookie team last year that did beautifully with little mentorship. There was a rookie team that adamantly wanted no mentors and didn't do well.

We are experiencing mentors coming out of the woodwork excited to be a part of this whole experience.

2002 taught our team a lot, and gave us goals for 2003, springing us forward in giant leaps.

There are some words from Dean Kamen

about mentors

[ngreen]

And their was a rookie team in 2003 that did beautifully with a large assortment of devoted mentors.

Last year and this year most of our mentor were and are non-technical mentors. We had mentors that worked on logistics, paperwork, fundraising, the big one--food, and PR. Without mentors we would have starved.

On the technical side. Although they had some say, most all the design was student thought of, proto-typed, and built.

Teams work without mentors but do not have the time, skill, or connections that are needed to make the differences FIRST wants to make.

I would make a bet that every team that has won the National Chairman's Award had mentors on their team. As much as FIRST gives us to do, it is impossible to do it well without mentors support and knowledge.

[Zil709]

Originally Posted by shyra1353

How do I convince my team that we need mentors ??

I'm shocked, really. I know that without our mentors, our team would be sitting on the floor of our shop, the kit of parts strewn haphazard about the room saying, "So, it's week 5. We need a robot. How 'bout that? Maybe if we put one of us in a box on wheels, we could pass that off as a robot?" Last year, our team was 5 freshmen with ZERO experience and two amazing mentors, who I realize now, don't get nearly enough credit. Without them, we would never even know how to put together a frame, let alone create a running robot.

I came into robotics with an ego that wouldn't die, convinced that I alone held the key to the universe. Okay, so maybe I wasn't that bad, but I would never ask for help. Imagine my shock when technobabble terms got thrown around a few times. Uhhmm...yeah. I took to writing things that i didn't know on my hand and I would go look them up later, refusing to 'look stupid' by asking. That lasted me about a week, and only when I asked my mentors could any real learning begin.

I suggest you just search around Chief Delphi in the Technical forum and find the hardest, most confusing question or five on the board, print them out, and hand it to your team. Tell them "If I leave, and come back in an hour, and every single person on this team understands the answer to that question and can explain it in detail to me, then I'll accept that we don't need mentors." I can almost guarantee that your team will stand staring at you, blinking ever so perplexed at the questions, and will admit defeat in about 4.3 seconds. Good luck!

(Sorry for being long-winded. I'll shut up now. )

[Dale(294engr]]

Mentors provide shared Experience and earned Wisdom
through having been through the trenches. (learned lessons)

Learned lessons come hard.

Mentorless teams unfortunately but frequently have tough experiences ...

Mentors can help inexperienced youth learn & apply
standard industry practices
to produce a robot more likely to achieve the desired functions, reliably,
and employing KISS
to survive through the beating received in test then
in a couple regionals and a national.

(assumes youth respectful, willing even eager to learn and apply for success)

Still I believe there should be FIRST competition tiers:

The stand alone students deserve to compete against like peer's

(especially those that have EARNED it thru prior FIRST experience)

1. Wholly student designed & built
2. Industry Mentored co-built designs & built (apprentice - mentor)
3. Wholly Industry designed & built
4. Some other TBD tier

Assuming 84 teams / tier for the Nationals....

WHAT A REVELATION
IF IN THE NATIONAL PLAYOFFs

Tier 1 trimphs over tiers 2 & 3... to take it all !!!!

Maybe that would boost FIRST viewer appeal
and more commercial station coverage buy-in
and feed proceeds back to FIRST for exponential growth !

(2004 = my 6th yr incl Nat/Reg Champ, Region runner-up, awards Esthetics, Engr Insp, Sportmanship)

[shyra1353]

here is the deal with the mentors now .. i didnt post it earlier though i should have ...

we have a few amazing mentors from one of our sponsors whom we all get along very well with. no one is no longer complaining, and we are all having a great time and learning a great deal.

we (as in the students) came up with a design ... it got scrapped (by us) ... we came up with another one .. presented it to our mentors .. little details were added / changed .. and we are now building that design.

as to who is building .. we students are doing everything we can, but we are not allowed to use certain machines (completely understandable) so things such as welding gets down by the mentors.

overall, we are a pretty happy team and we work well with our mentors and everyone has realized that we wouldnt be even close to where we are without them.

Thanks to everyone for their input

--shyra