Responsibilities of a Mentor

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Kelly

Ideally, the students would have been so heavily involved with building the robot, they know how to fix it better than the mentors.

"Ideal" does not mean the same thing in all situations. Inspiration works just as well for some teams whose students are stretched past their competence levels as it does for other teams whose mentors did nothing the students weren't capable of doing on their own.

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)

I think you might be misunderstanding the difference between inspiration and learning. In order to "change the culture" we don't necessarily need to show people how to do something. We just need to show what is possible with the right training and study. That training and study is not all going to happen within the time constraints of an FRC season, but the relatively brief bits of inspiration can easily influence the rest of a student's educational career.

If you want to focus on a "kids can do it for themselves" environment, I think you're going to miss out on a big part of the experience of having engineering mentors as part of the team. High school students should not be expected to have the same skill sets as professional engineers who have had years more of study, learning, and practice in the relevant fields. The same goes for machining, programming, team-building, fundraising, networking, recruiting, strategic planning, etc.

Mentors are the fundamental resource around which FIRST is built. To marginalize them would be to waste that resource.