GP? I think not.

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Frenchie

Truth is, a mentor dominated team is usually a student abandoned team. Many times, the mentors are willing to teach but few students are willing to step up into leadership.

This statement, I think, sums up well the truth of most teams where you rarely see a student working on the robot. And this is the reality on our team, which in the past 2 years has become one of those teams with almost no students in the pits, so I'll use us as an example of perhaps why you see this happening.

I was a student on our team from 2004-2007, and this year was my first year mentoring on it. In my first years (04 & 05) the team had very strong student leadership and a pretty good amount of mentors involved (5 engineers with varying availability for each). The team built extremely competitive robots (we were top 8 seeds both years) and students on the team worked hard to gain more mentors and more sponsorship to help out for the future, so we'd be able to attend more competitions and try even more complex designs.
Then in 2006, the leadership graduated and a new set of students (myself included) stepped up to fill their shoes. But these students didn't have the dedication or the attitudes of the previous ones, and by the end of the year I was the only remaining member of that group of officers, as we found ourselves scrambling throughout the year to replace them as they one by one left the team. Since our team was primarily student led, the sudden shift in leadership quality meant alot of poorly trained new students and alot of time sitting around doing little. And this showed in our robot quality, as we performed much worse in qualifiers than before (going 3-5 if I remember correctly).
Now last year and this year our team has shifted to be more mentor run and the robot less student built. This is due to a combination of things. We now have more mentors (as a result of our efforts to recruit mentors years ago and students returning to mentor we have 15+ mentors), so automatically the mentors start to have more of an impact. Our school cut some of its tech classes (networking, drafting, and programming specifically), so there is less interest in the student body in technology. But mainly it is because the problems of 06 are still affecting us, not only because we are wary of making the team too student dependent should a similar situation occur again, but also because the new students we got that year learned from that leadership's good AND bad habits, and they still exhibit those habits today.

So our current team still has eager excited students, who put their heart and soul into the robot and making sure it gets done, but the majority of students don't put in as much effort as in the past. This has forced us to make mentors more involved to ensure the robot gets built and stays running. Yet this hasn't correlated with success; our 2 best performing robots were the ones built with our best student leadership. And this is because all mentors really do is ensure that you have a functioning robot; strategy, drivers, design, and scouting (key components to winning) can be enhanced by mentors but really require good students to come up with and implement them (I've noticed that engineer mentors actually tend to be really bad at driving advice ).

So next time you see a group of mentors huddled around a robot and no student in sight, don't be so quick to judge that the mentors are being over-bearing, and be glad that you have students on your team who are eager to do it themselves. It may be that they simply had to get involved to make sure that a robot was built, that all the eager students were in one area (maybe electrical) and no one wanted to do another portion (maybe programming). If you were a mentor, and you had the choice between building part of the robot yourself or no robot being built, which would you choose? Which inspires more, students watching as a robot is built, or students who show up with no bot at all?