There is a team in Dearborn Heights (SE Michigan) that we (team 66) are trying to help start. They are looking for mentors who have a shop as well as space for them. The school is goign to support them financially, but they have no shop, no space, no equipmet, and more importantly, no experience. As students we will be able to mentor them over the summer, and some during build season, but we simply do not hav the human resources to commit people to them every day for 6 weeks. If anyone kn0ows a business/corporation/college in the Dearborn Heights area that would be interested in getting involved in FIRST please contact me via this forum, or an email to: [email protected] or AIM me at: DavidButzin
Wish we could help, but we’re over here in California. However, if there are any questions that we could answer for you via email, we’d be happy to mentor that way.
The best place to start looking for mentors is with the parents of potential team members. When things get rough with the school, it is the parents who can make them “see the light”. After all, the parents are their customer.
Our team has extensive parental involvement, and I think it is a really good thing. Many of our mentors are also parents of team members. We had one mentor this year who was “between” kids. One graduated and the next was not quite old enough. His “day job” is as a power plant maintenance supervisor. You would be amazed at what he can do with simple hand tools. He and our wiring guy (who maintains harbor cranes for a living) are two of the three mentors I’d hate to loose most. The other is the owner of the machine shop that sponsors us.
None of these men has a college degree. But they are used to DOING things with what is at hand. They let us engineer types figure out what needs to be done, then they go figure out how to do it. So don’t let lack of “technical” qualifications persuade you that a person would not be helpful. They often have more relevant experience than “real engineers”.
That handles part of the experience question. The rest you provide. When we are mentoring a team we meet with them early in the year when they are organizing. We meet with them before Kickoff and often our teams will “play” the game together using human pseudo-robots right afterwards. During build season a knowledgable representative of our team visits at least once a week to discuss problems and assess progress. This doesn’t take much in terms of man-hours, but it is critical to their success. After ship we meet again to help prepare for the Regional and usually a wrap-up session afterwards.
Your team mentoring efforts will require small levels of effort over a long time rather than intense effort over a short time. (no need to have somebody there every day, that would probably be counter-productive) The focus is on guiding their activity (ie. advising “Do one thing well”), rather than trying to teach them everything about how to build a robot. You also know where to get help. I’m not above calling on someone from another team to provide help for our rookies when what they need is outside our expertise. But I’ve been around and know who to call for what, they don’t.
For a shop they can use a garage if necessary. Just about anybody has access to one of those. Maybe you could rent a bay in a “self storage” place? Over the years we have used an empty store front, some unused manufacturing space, and a basement room in an unused section of a power plant. We have also used team member garages for spot work. For the first few years all of our tools belonged to someone on the team. It was three years before the team had it’s own tools.
BTW mentoring a team is a long term thing. We still do things and help teams we mentored two and more years ago. We don’t help at the same level, but they know who to call when they get stuck.
Over the years the BeachBots have formally mentored four teams. All are still around. Two have won Rookie All Star Awards. One of those also got a National Rookie All Star. They also beat us in the Finals at AZ in 2003. Another was the only team to knok us off the bar this year (for which they apologized profusely later). A third picked us to join them in the finals this year at the LA regional. Helping these rag-tag rookies turn into powerhouses has been one of the most rewarding parts of FIRST for me. But sometimes I wonder if we didn’t do the job too well
How about the University of Michigan - Dearborn? Its close by, has a good engineering school that gets involved in college student competitions, even has an alumnus on FIRST’s board of directors (Tom Stephens).
