Why do teams voluntarily do FIRST without adult technical mentors?

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by phrontist

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot.

I've been through 7 seasons of FIRST and I have yet to come across any robot that I could confirm was built entirely by engineers. Once again, I think a lot of people see robots which they assume are made entirely by engineers and run with it. And statements like this keep reinforcing it for the newcomers (even if you're only speaking hypothetically).

Originally Posted by Ryan F.

The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.

Originally Posted by phrontist

If we don't have a fair competition, it will quickly degrade into a sham.

Guess what people: this debate is nothing new. People (including me) were saying things just like this in 1995. I remember getting beaten by (what I thought was) an engineer-built bot and thinking it was so unfair. And I remember saying that the competition will not grow if it continues. Well, that was 10 years ago when there were 43 teams at the Championship and 1 regional. Guess what: I was wrong. Way wrong. FIRST has like 1000 teams now with 20-some regionals, and more coming every year.

FIRST seems to have found a formula for success, and that includes all the types of teams out there, not just student-built teams. Some of you are talking about mentors who are interested in the competition and engaged with their teams as if it's a bad thing. Frankly, some of the things being said in this thread are borderline insulting to mentors who volunteer up to thousands of hours each in order to provide this opportunity for you guys. Some of you are acting like we should volunteer all this time but do so solely to operate as babysitters and not "get in the way". I'm sorry, but the fact of the matter is a lot of the great engineers in this program probably wouldn't be here if they were not given the opportunity to work on their robots alongside their students.

To all of you on here who are speaking so harshly about engineers who design parts of their robot: hopefully you don't use any of the kit transmissions, or kit frame, or parts from Andymark, or Skyway wheels, or anything else that isn't a raw material because guess what: those parts were designed by professional engineers. If your team buys a transmission and has students install it, is that really better than another team who has an engineer design their own transmission and their students install it?