How involved are your mentors?

[Sunshine]

Students make all decisions by consensus. They decide on strategy and brainstorm ideas for robot. Occasionally mentors will give ideas during this process if students have not thought about something that may be important but students make all final decisions. One of the fun parts of the season is when they all bring in mock ups of their ideas made from various materials or on CAD. In most situations they will come up with 2-3 winning ideas that we will see other teams develop. The gotcha moment every year is when a student turns to the mentors and says: " this is possible right?". The learning about engineering principles and the math and science behind the robot starts here.

Students build and/or fabricate about 90% of the robot parts. We do not have a machine shop so we always look at what can be made from ITEM, kit of parts or bought off the shelf. Occasionally we need help with a sponsor/mentor who needs to fabricate a part that the kids design. We are fortunate that we have a 3D printer and students design and install parts that they created on the 3D printer. Student do all the building, rebuilding and rebuilding again. Mentors are there to assist and help but kids have tools in their hands almost all of the time.

You will never see a mentor in our pit working on the robot with a toll in their hand. By then, the kids can almost tear that robot apart with their eyes closed. You'll see mentors observing and giving guidance if needed but kids do all the work.

Mentors go through and show students the calculations of how and why things should work. Students need occasional help with learning how the CAD parts should be made. They learn about strength of materials, gear ratios, rpm calculations, center of gravity, MOI, centriods, ohms law, etc. etc. etc.

This year we had another one of those great moments after our first event. Students saw how well vacuums worked and wanted to investigate if we could do it. A mentor brought in his hand held vacuum cleaner and we saw it had the power needed. The team tore it down saw how the impeller worked and reverse engineered that impeller on CAD and then they made the part on the 3D printer. The student excitement was awesome when it worked. The CAD team went on to make the shroud (casing around the impeller and tested various KOP motors and funnels. You should be able to see our vacuum on our robot next week at 10,000 Lakes.

It has been said in another thread but just going through the above process has made our students winners. They're proud and we are proud of them.