FAHA: Too much help from mentors?

[tenfour]

Students have got to be exposed to engineering. As such, they have to have some involvement in the process.

I have been a student in a Robotics team for 3 years, then mentored a FLL team, and now I"m back mentoring my old robotics team. From this, I have learned that you should help the team build a nice robot, but not too much. If you give the students as much as they can handle, but not alot more, they will grow. To little and they will not. Too much, and they will begin to hate the process.

[Koko Ed]

When I joined the X-Cats two years ago to mentor the animation team Greg(who is now the animation mentor for Webster Sparx) and I both agreed how blessed we were to have four wonderful, enthusiatic and talented girls who took over the project from day one. They were practically climbing over each other to work on the computers. We both alos knew that there was no way that future teams would compare to them and we were right.
Our philosiphy on the X-Cats is the kids have to at least do one year working on the robot so they may do only one year on animation, so every year we get a whole new animation team and kids of varying degrees of talent,ambition and work ethic. 3D Studio Max is a bear of a program especially of you are new to it and the last two years I have found myself having to hustle just to finish the projects with all-nighters while attending college and working full-time.
One is I think I have poor communication skills as a mentor because planning still equates to a rush job in the end with less than desirable results. I need to make sure the kids know where the project stands better instead of just hunkering down after hours and going it alone. It definately makes me rethink strategies to take advantage of the kids I get. Every year I'll grow a little more from the mistakes I make. That's a good thing.

[Bytor]

KoKo Ed makes a good point. This will continue to be a hot-button topic simply because the make-up of each team changes from year to year. Kids leave the team, younger team members mature (the difference between 9th graders and seniors is astonishing), new members join, mentors gain experience and change as well.

Since the make-up and personalities of the team will change year-by-year, the role of team mentors will continue to evolve. Know how "much" to mentor is just one of many challenges that face team mentors every season.

Fortunately, most of us mentor for the big bucks!

Peace