I attended Jon’s session at the Haas HTEC conference on their college FRC mentor training program. It was quite impressive.
I think other universities and states should delve into what UNLV is doing and replicate it in their respective areas.
The FRC teams in Nevada are very lucky to have this kind of mentorship support, along with some level of supplies and equipment support also.
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Hello Everyone! Im a mentor for this upcoming season here and I was asked to add some of my thoughts to this thread after reading through it. I appreciate a lot of the points made, particularly the importance of pedagogy and experience. Experience is obviously vital to the ability of being able to add meaningful and productive work into the competition team. Being a mentor is meaningless if you’re unable to provide any knowledge or substance to those you aim to teach, which is why being familiar and knowledgeable of the competition platform is crucial. Likewise, being able to adequately and sufficiently convey and relay that knowledge to others is just as vital to being an asset to those you seek to help. Pedagogy is the action and method of teaching, which more directly implies the idea of teaching in the most efficient and proper way possible, which is crucial to the ability for a mentor to adequately and properly relay and instill information into those which they are helping. I believe that the youth being actively and properly involved into STEM environments is crucial to not only providing them with better outcomes personally, but also to provide for the world around them in ways that will be needed to address and resolve modern and future problems. Thank you all for your additions to this thread and allowing me to expand my understanding of what is needed in being a mentor!
I completely agree with the points made here. I come from a background of mentoring and teaching math to the people around me who needed an extra push in the right direction to understand what they didn’t fully grasp from the last chapter or of our class, and the more I worked with them the more they understood what they were doing, right or wrong. Those people just needed someone in their corner going through everything with them, not someone who’d toss the lesson plan at them and say “have at it.” This idea of teaching with someone instead of at someone is something I’ve since tried to incorporate into everything I do, and I’ll continue to do so with the high school FRC teams I’ll come to mentor next semester. The way I plan to implement it with them is by asking a lot more questions than I have to answer. Of course, there will be times where the student has no way of knowing what I’m trying to teach them and for those moments I’ll have my prior knowledge and experience ready, but for the rest of my time with them I want to encourage them to think about the solution themselves so that they don’t develop a habit of shying away from a challenge. It’s a simple yet effective strategy to prepare the kids for not just game day but also the industry they’re hoping to break into.
I’m a student of J.Iaz for Fall 2024.
Absolutely! What Froggo_boy_21 mentioned about “not tossing them a lesson plan” and rather being a person who can ask them questions to figure out what WE as mentors need to learn in order to better help them is incredibly impactful.
To continue in Froggy’s scope, I too am a UNLV student in OP J.Laz’s class. I have a background in mentoring students and a background in robotics, but not a combination of both. I would like to apply the existing skills of mentoring to these students in the same manner I used to, being understanding what is the root of their troubles rather than telling them what they’re doing is wrong. As a mentor, I would become a friend of the students prior to even asking them what they needed help with. If you are able to create trust and earn their respect, the process of helping them will be 10x more fluid rather than if you just ask whats wrong and telling them what to do. A sense of awkwardness lingers when no social connection is made. Especially considering what they’re subjecting themselves to, being the competition, the nature of being in FRC is due to their passion. To crush their spirit by only helping and never being friendly is simply inexcusable.
Hello, I’m Alberto, a mentor for the upcoming 2025 season and I wanted to agree that this will be a time commitment and that one should have good time management when considering becoming a mentor. It is a position that helps future generations be more open minded to learning, and become more involved in their communities. Engineering is a collaborative effort that involves the wildness to always learn. Teaching and guiding others is not a simple task. People vary and no one is the same person. People learn things differently and simply walking and giving them some tips is not the whole deal with mentoring students. It is important to understand everyone’s strengths and their weaknesses and try to get a grasp on what each member is. While one can find a method of teaching everyone a general overview to develop their skills throughout the different subsystems… this should be kept to a minimum. Time is not an ally for the limited period, and so discussions should be held as well as addressing tasks each time the mentor and the team meet. This should be short but provide enough time to address concerns and learn what team meetings are like in the industry. Textbook methods aren’t the best and giving questions to the team to understand their knowledge is something that should be done. Better comprehension of what the team needs help with and what they already know. If something can’t be answered by me or another mentor, then the skills of conducting a case study along with the students can be very beneficial in retaining the information. If they work alongside you on small case studies, this will be more likely to stick than you rather than finding the answers and delivering them to the team.
Thanks for your response. One thing I’d like you to explore more, or possibly use more precise language, is regarding befriending students. I definitely agree having a positive relationship and good rapport with a student is a must for quality mentorship, but being a friend would be crossing a bit of a line. As an adult working with students, sometimes we can’t act as “friendly” as they would like, for their safety, to support their growth and maturity, etc. So I agree you can be friendly with students, and I suggest that you should, but establish a “friend” relationship with students you are mentoring would not be advised.
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Hello Katie,
I appreciate the opportunity to hear from the schools on where we can help improve the experience for the students and motivate them to pursue a stem higher education. I have previous experience as well with robotics because I did FRC for 4 years in high school with team 987 as well as mentored for VEX robotics for 2 summers during summer camps. I have a background understanding of what it is like to be on a well structured team where it’s heavily based on communication and effective teamwork to get as far as the world championship. One of the many tasks I plan to take on this upcoming semester is to find ways to positively impact students in finding robotics as a good way to find their niche in the STEM community, make friends with similar interests as well as meet companies that could potentially have careers once they graduate. In the topic of problem solving, I will also be building a robot in this semester so I will be using the problems I encounter now while building the robot in the class as problems I could possibly try finding multiple solutions to and taking notes on it to reference during my time of working with the schools. I will also now be researching the best platform of communication for the team where everyone can be interactive with possibly documenting as well so the effective communication can also be carried on after they go home as well! With my experience before the class as well as the skills I am going to learn this semester , I am ready to see what this upcoming season will bring!
Hello everyone. I’m new to robotics and the FRC as a whole. I feel like personally; after reading various inputs and points of view I have a lot of things to consider and take note of since I will be mentoring for the first time in a capacity like this one. The main things that stuck out to me were the time commitment, ability to have knowledge to give, and making sure i am a mentor, and not a friend. I had never considered the time commitment needed until we started talking about the timeline given to have robots completed meaning more of my time in shorter time frame is needed. With the knowledge to give, I just need to make sure I understand as much about FRC and robotics as possible to be able to genuinely assist and benefit a team. Lastly, with the actual mentoring, I’ve never mentored in a competition-based capacity. I have had times where people came to me for advice etc. when making decisions but it’s like a distinct line between mentoring and friendship because I’m seeing that the professionalism has to remain for it to be a true mentorship relationship. Thank you all so much for all this insight and I’m excited to see how much I progress and learn throughout the process so that I can do the same as a mentor myself.