We’re exploring the possibility of a long-term collaboration with the Mechanical Engineering school of a local university. Please tell us about your experience with such partnerships.
What’s in it for the high school? Obvious possibilities are mentoring, machining, and money. Do you get any or all of those? Any other benefits for the team?
What’s in it for the college? Recruiting opportunities, learning opportunities. Anything else? Success stories?
If there is a list somewhere of high school/college teams, it would help us a lot to see it. I saw the related thread, and that’s a start.
I’m on the University end of the University/High School collaboration. Usually, we can only provide personnel. We usually don’t have enough money to actually support the high school aspect of the team (although we usually can finance our own travel expenses). We also are limited in the amount of machining support we can provide (given that we have to fight with Formula 1 for the use of the machine shop and they own the after hours insurance).
That basically leaves us providing mentors. Surprisingly, this works out well. We generally have a number of FIRST veterans on the team (some of us having been in FIRST since the 1v1v1 days). The level of experience is always useful as well as the fact that it’s different experience from everyone else. Now, as to why you’d want college students as mentors, the main advantage is that college students are a good bridge between the engineers and the high school students. The engineers tend to relate better to the college students and the high school students tend to relate better to the college students. Frequently, we end up making sure that the high school students know what’s going on and that they stay involved in the project. College students also are frequently willing to put more hours into the project than engineers are (mainly because they don’t have families waiting at home). So there are many advantages to it. But don’t expect money or machining as that’s frequently hard to come by (although obviously not unheard of).
I am one of the leaders of the Georgia Tech mentors for teams in Georgia. We work directly with Wheeler High school just outside of Atlanta. We are able to provide funds as well as machine shop space to our team. Through the Mechanical engineering school as well as the student government association, we provide the high school with the registration fee as well as robot building costs.
Georgia Tech has also recently set up a team competition building with a common machine shop used by all the competition groups as well as individual space for each group. Our FIRST group was fortunate enough to receive some space as well as use of the machine shop. We are also able to set up part of the playing field for the six weeks as well.
There are many advantages to having college mentors. One is that we have seen it from the high school perspective not long ago and can give insight as to that. Many of the college mentors on our team have been around since 1999 so we have quite a bit of FIRST experience. The mentors also have experience from different teams which can help improve designs and ideas. As Matt mentioned, it does bridge the gap between engineers and high school students. THis makes a big difference in the smooth running of the team. In our case, we are also able to provide money and resources. We also run sessions in the Fall to teach students engineering principles and we able to bring in some professors to speak to the high schoolers.
For the college, it is a great opportunity to recruit students. More and more FIRSTers are deciding on colleges with involvement in FIRST in mind. High schoolers also get to interact with the college students and learn about college life. This program brings a lot of visibility for the college. The college students learn a lot from it as well. You learn a lot more when you are teaching someone else. All in all it is a plus for everyone.
If you have any questions about our program, or want help in getting that link with the college started, feel free to pop me an email or private message. Good luck!!!
As you may or may not know, Purdue University works closely with team 461, made up of High Schools in the West Lafayette area. We plan on publishing a document soon that would give you a lot of information.
An early version of this document has already been posted in the whitepapers. I’m sure Shannon would love to talk with you about it. We have an entire division of our team this year that is dedicated to making this sort of thing happen.
I college mentorship is an excellent way to boost the learning and enjoyment of a high school team. The college students will generally know more about what will or will not work than the highschoolers and can offer great insight and guidance. The also can sometimes get access to the colleges workshops if they are already associated with a group in the college that has access, thus being able to do more precise or detailed work than would otherwise be possible using the highschools resources… however that much you probably already knew.
I do want to caution you about these high school college relationships as there can be a detrimental downside that i am in the process of trying to overcome with a team i recently started working with. That is the college students sometimes offer to much guidance to the point where rather than teaching the high schoolers how to do stuff and suggesting what to do, they instead take it upon themselves to just completely build the robot on their own. This kills the interest of the high schoolers, makes the building phase fairly boring, and just overall takes away from the enjoyment and excitement that go along with the 2am building sessions and the caffine highs required to finish ontime. I highly recommend and encourage high school college relationships but make sure the college mentors know that they are there to assist the high schoolers, not to do it for them. also i’d recommend regular “reality checks” for the college students to see that they are not getting over-involved.
