Training technical mentors

[StevenB]

I am currently a college senior studying computer engineering, and I want to find ways to get more of my peers involved in FIRST. Last year, some of my fellow students were given class credit for helping a couple of local teams, but unfortunately they weren't able to do much useful work, because FIRST requires a fairly specific skill set that they don't have.

Most of my electrical and computer engineering friends could design and simulate some cool circuits, but they barely know how to solder. And if I ask them to wire up a quadrature encoder or crimp a ring terminal on a 12 AWG wire, they look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language.

In my experience as a student and mentor, I've found that technical mentors who don't understand FIRST tend to not be much help. They mean well, but they spend too much time wandering down trails that are violations of the rules or don't make sense in our context. Besides going to a competition, are there suggestions for a "crash course" that could get these smart but uninitiated folks up to speed?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by StevenB

Besides going to a competition, are there suggestions for a "crash course" that could get these smart but uninitiated folks up to speed?

There's no such thing as a crash course in Gracious Professionalism. You can't initiate someone without putting him or her in the middle of things.

Watch "Gearing Up", perhaps? It's better than nothing, and it might allow them to accelerate a bit more smoothly without running into quite so many walls along the way to useful speed.

[EricH]

I think the first thing to do is to find out what they do/don't know about practical electronics. A lot of stuff can be theoretical, but without some basic practical knowledge, theory doesn't necessarily translate into happy assembly/repair technicians. Then you deal with what they don't know, or need more practice in.

As far as the rabbit trails/illegal stuff area, start out by having them read a few sections of the rules. For example, maybe not the entire robot section, but anything to do with the electronics. Maybe not the arena section or the tournament section, but the game section should be required reading.

Other than that, going to a competition.

[jason_zielke]

It sounds like you are dealing with 2 different issues here: technical abilities that match the needs of FRC and context about FRC.

In both cases, new mentors need to come in with a focus on learning, rather than teaching. The best mentors I know are that way because they spend (or have spent) lots of time learning as a part of being on the team.

I have found that the former issue (direct technical abilities) is best learned through a mentoring approach (whether it is mentor to student or seasoned mentor to new mentor). We typically match our new mentors up with a seasoned mentor to learn from.

As for learning about context, going to a competition and understanding the game during play is the best approach. However, this experience can be simulated by reading a previous years game, watching videos and talking strategy/game play. Also, once they understand the game, go through pictures of robots on CD that were very successful at that game and talk through how they worked. We have found that this approach works well to get new students up to speed on context of FRC and I expect it would do the same for new mentors inexperienced with FRC.

[DavidGitz]

Originally Posted by StevenB

I am currently a college senior studying computer engineering, and I want to find ways to get more of my peers involved in FIRST. Last year, some of my fellow students were given class credit for helping a couple of local teams, but unfortunately they weren't able to do much useful work, because FIRST requires a fairly specific skill set that they don't have.

Most of my electrical and computer engineering friends could design and simulate some cool circuits, but they barely know how to solder. And if I ask them to wire up a quadrature encoder or crimp a ring terminal on a 12 AWG wire, they look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language.

It sounds like we went to the same college. However, I've found this to be the case with non-college age (i.e. industry) hopeful mentors as well. I have more than a few times had someone come to a meeting saying they would like be involved as a mentor, help out for an hour or 2, maybe come to a few more meetings but then they just disappear. It's frustrating in a couple ways, 1) we take time out of our team meetings to educate the new mentors, 2) the students see them as being part of their team and they disappear and 3) (just as you said) they take up a lot of time in a meeting with little knowledge about the intrinsics of FIRST (as they haven't taken the time yet to go through the rules, look at other designs, that kind of thing). In essence, they are just like a new member of the team, which is completely fine, but the other students perceive them to have a leadership role so that can cause a lot of issues.

My "fix" is, when I have a mentor who seems to want to help out (they have come to a few meetings) I sit down and have a talk with them about FIRST. What it really means, what we give to the kids, their role, and more importantly, the long list of their responsibilities. I have a CD that I also give them (the link to it escapes me now) which gives them a compiled source of information, such as the rules, pictures, a series of presentations, pretty much just more information than they would really want. And I think the test is, if they go through that material and acknowledging those responsibilities they still come back, I am more than happy to stick with them. Most of the time they don't end up coming back, due to them not understanding the full context of FIRST. Which honestly I'm completly fine with. I'd rather have 3 mentors on my team that are dedicated to FIRST and what it stands for than 10 adults who come once a week to see "what we're up to".

Obviously, the mentors that I'm speaking about are ones actively involved with the Build Season. There are many roles of mentors that do not require this level of interactivity, this is only designed for the mentors where we expect a lot of time out of them over a short period of time. And again, this is just my approach, I have found it useful over the years but I'm sure some people will disagree to my approach. Something big that I've found over the years is that, the more dedicated your mentors are, the more dedicated the students are.

when I was invited to help out a rookie team 6 years ago I had know idea what I was signing up for...I thought I was going to be helping out a couple of kids with a science project...Once they showed me what we were up against I adopted the attitude of 'knowlegable team member' more than 'mentor'...The kids knew the game, I only knew how to program. we did well winning rookie allstar and going to atlanta..

For me small teams with few mentors worked the best...Too many mentors can spoil the bot...

Brian

[Radical Pi]

I'm kinda looking for help here too. I'm the only veteran programmer on our team, and we have 2 rookies. We're also getting our first true programming mentor for a long time. I think he would understand the basic concepts of FIRST since he's one of the parents, but I need to teach him all of the technical aspects of the control system (especially since he works in web development).

So basically I'm looking for suggestions on what the best way would be to bring the new mentor up to speed on the control system. If it also involves teaching the rookies at the same time that would be awesome.