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?