[FRC Blog]: The Role of Mentors in FIRST Robotics Competition

FIRST General Forum
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The Role of Mentors in FIRST ® Robotics Competition

Written by Collin Fultz, FIRST Robotics Competition Senior Director

Every year, the same question is raised: “How much involvement in building the robot should the mentors have?”

Every year, the answer is the same: “However much is needed to inspire the youth on the team.”

Our mission is to create programs that give young people skills, confidence, and resilience to build a better world, and mentors are a key component to that in FIRST ® Robotics Competition. Adult mentorship is part of what makes FIRST ® so effective, and it’s been core to our programs from the very beginning. This is also true for the support given to teams by non-technical mentors in areas like logistics, business planning, fundraising, and outreach.

Like I said at Kickoff last year, the level of involvement of mentors on a team will vary team-by-team and often year-by-year. For example, a team may have a student or group of students with enough CAD skills to largely create the CAD model of their robot with limited mentor guidance and oversight. The same mentor may need to take a more hands-on approach the next year if those students graduate and no other students have those skills yet. And, in some cases, team or school rules may require adults to handle certain tools.

Part of being successful as an organization is knowing what you are and knowing what you aren’t. FIRST Robotics Competition is not a program where youth build a robot exclusively on their own to compete against another robot built exclusively by youth. It is a program where youth work both with each other and with adult mentors who help them learn new skills and grow as individuals.

Technology has made being a FIRST mentor much more accessible than it was when I was a student team member. The FIRST Mentor Network has more than 1300 mentors, technical and non-technical, ready and willing to help teams regardless of their location.

Remember that FIRST is about Inspiration. It’s about being to STEAM what the NFL is to sports or Taylor Swift is to music. Team mentors have been a key part of that mission from the beginning, and we don’t see that changing.

Two other notes on mentors:

There are no plans to remove the ability for adults to serve as a drive team coach. I think that some of the greatest mentoring can happen in the tensest moments, including right before, during, and after a match. High school sports have adults actively coaching during gameplay, and FIRST Robotics Competition is no different.

Being mentored doesn’t stop when you graduate high school. Some of the most impactful mentoring I received happened early on in my own mentoring and volunteering journey post high school.

Finally, it just so happens that January is National Mentoring Month in the United States. To all the FIRST mentors who are changing lives and transforming communities – we thank you.

Thank you, Collin, for making this a clear statement.

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Crystal clear.

FIRST Robotics Competition is not a program where youth build a robot exclusively on their own to compete against another robot built exclusively by youth. It is a program where youth work both with each other and with adult mentors who help them learn new skills and grow as individuals.

Great response, Collin.

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An excellent reminder!

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Saw the thread title, thought ‘oh no, not this again’, then noticed the source. An excellent writeup and I’m glad to see that FIRST still has a positive stance on mentor involvement

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I’m very glad to have something to cite that isn’t a now-removed blog post transcribing a kickoff speech by someone more than two decades ago.

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This is going to ruffle some feathers… including some PDPs, long time mentors, and students. I think that’s a-ok… it’s a good reminder about what mentorship is and can be.

As people process what has just been said in this blog after we have had a rather long vacuum of absence of statements like this… give them grace and compassion. Help them process it and what it means not just for FRC but also their own FRC experience. Be empathetic.

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Am I just out of the loop on something?

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There has been a recent email campaign from former members of certain teams pushing hard for FIRST to limit the involvement of mentors in FRC. Our team has receieved several emails over the last few weeks in regards to it.

I believe there has also been some go-fund-me style campaign(s) as of late trying to drum-up support here aswell to my knowledge (though my knowledge here is limited)

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Reading this blog post just made my season. i didn’t realize how much anxiety i was harboring about over reaching as a mentor. i feel… excited about FRC again for the first time in a few years

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Honestly thought it was taboo and made a specific point to all of our mentors that the final product should be student only. Even if it was a mentor does it first and then the students copy.

This makes me feel less guilty when we do have to step in on low resource years. Our team size fluctuates wildly. We have gone from 40 FRC students and 4 FTC full teams down to 7 FRC students at some points. This year is like 18 FRC students and 2 FTC students.

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My approach to mentoring in FRC was essentially this—in addition to any duties that must be done by adults (for policies or other reasons), I acted as the “gap filler” to help the overall team be successful when students didn’t have the skills. Certainly mentors should strive to involve students at those times (to start the cycle of “mentor do, student watch”, “student do, mentor watch”, “student do”), but doing nothing and letting the team fail as a whole in these situations does not result in inspiration to the students in other areas.

To echo Collin, FRC from its inception has always been about students and mentors working together to solve a difficult problem, and students drawing inspiration from the interaction and seeing how mentors tackle problems too (both technical and interpersonal). I’m glad to see that there are no intentions to change this fundamental tenet that makes FRC such a powerful program for inspiration.

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Thanks for making this clear Collin! I’ll definitely be sharing this locally with as many teams as possible and I’m very excited about the positive discussions it will generate.

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I’m extremely glad you said this - this is exactly what me and others were discussing last night. Without a statement like this - people fear judgement when they do NEED to get more involved.

Let’s all be honest about what we do on our teams, and let’s be transparent that what we do is dynamic every year, with every subteam, and with every kid.

Going to echo what we stated in our team’s 2024 Build Blog:

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… there are years when I do more than I would like, especially following covid, because it’s what the team and students need. Our team has changed so much over the years, you can almost separate it out into different “eras” based on things like the level of mentor involvement, the drive of the students, the focus on the team (robot vs outreach, for example), etc.

I’ve had mentors from other teams ask me about how teams run, and I always start with “every team is different, I can only tell you what we’ve found success with”.

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This is how I view it. FRC is a competition. If high school basketball teams had adults on the court, it’d obviously be unfair. The coaches can say all they want, but it’s the student players actually doing the work. FRC is very different in this sense. “Oh my group of CAD students aren’t competent enough to CAD this mechanism, I’ll just do it myself!” I find this to be somewhat against the point of FIRST. Like I said at the start, this is a COMPETITION, and as a student in a student-lead team, I want to be competitive, but to be frank, my team can’t compete against these heavily mentor built robots. Teams with little to no mentor involvement have an extremely large disadvantage that I’d like to see eliminated at some point. Also I find it to be a bit silly seeing a mentor drive coach. Like it’s a high school game with robots and you’re screaming into your students ears to go pick up a game object. Anyway, I feel like I need to represent the opposing view of this. I know I hyperbolized the role of mentors and not all teams are like this, but the point is there.

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Response to what? :wink:

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High school basketball teams have adult coaches drawing up the plays though, similar to FRC coaches that assist their drive teams with strategy and in match play calls.

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I feel the exact same way. Over the past couple years there have been a couple times where I felt that myself jumping in and and cadding up some small things on the robot or making the changes for the next intake iteration was required but I could never fully convince myself that is was ok by FIRST standards. I could totally justify it to myself on the grounds of our cad students weren’t gonna be there for a few days and we have a whole mechanical team there ready to manufacture and assemble something but I could never quite get over the feeling that what I was doing wasn’t necessarily within the vision scope of FIRST.

I applaud FIRST for finally making a more clear public statement about the roles of mentors.

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