Responsibilities of a Mentor

[Kelly]

Originally Posted by EricH

Take the mentor involvement out of the pits for a moment. They're at your facility, ready to answer questions, help you, hold a part. Now, you get to the event and they can't enter the pit. You suddenly have something go wrong that you don't know how to fix. You have to tell the mentor who is in the stands or at work what the issue is, with no way to send pictures (the engineer's language) and only your words. The fix might not work, or might not even be possible. And, according to Murphy, something WILL go wrong, and most likely the precise event that would cause this situation.

Ideally, the students would have been so heavily involved with building the robot, they know how to fix it better than the mentors. During the years I was on 1418, by competition time, there was nothing the mentors knew about our robots that at least one team member didn't know better. Build season is another story, that's when general engineering experience comes in handy, but at competitions it's all about knowing your machine.

Originally Posted by EricH

FIRST is about changing the culture, not conforming to it. But each team is free to choose how they do so.

I don't see how heavier involvement from mentors helps FIRST change the culture any more. If anything, I think it does the opposite. Kids learn in school how to sit and watch and be detached from science while they follow advice (orders) from their elders. We already know that professional engineers can build robots. What's really culture changing is when kids can do it for themselves. (and they can, when the mentors step back)

EricH also alluded to other hands-off for adults competitions, and I thought of Odyssey of the Mind. The best part of OM is seeing the crazy and inventive stuff students come up with when no one tells them the 'right' thing to do. My mom was a judge for several years and she said it was pretty easy to tell which projects the parents had done and that the kids' projects were generally better.

The feeling of ownership I got from my FIRST and OM teams has no comparison and surely has made me a much better person than yielding control to the mentors would have.
God, I miss touch typing. I apologize in advance for any grammatical oddities, I'm not used to thinking so much faster than I can get words down.