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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend that worked on FIRST two teams (one after another..). The enthusiasm level was high, but from what he described it didn't seem super great at teaching as the mentors ended up doing a lot of the work, Especially on the software side. We compared notes, as I was volunteering at the time for science olymipiad.

I went to the FIRST competition and it was fun. Maybe I'm wrong and those who participated got more out of it than I suspect.

edit: It some people got more out of than my friend indicated. Maybe better structured teams than his..

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Mentor involvement really varies team-to-team. I’ve seen teams where the students don’t do a lot on the software side, but the majority of teams I’ve seen as a “software helper” volunteer at events (and talking with other teams) have had significant student involvement.

On another note: the FIRST Robotics Competition’s official support library (WPILib) includes a number of advanced control features (trajectory generator, extended/unscented/“regular” Kalman filters, LQR) that were written almost entirely by students. I was one of the students involved in this work, and I can say with certainty that students can get a tremendous amount out of the program.

This is very much not true on my team.

I lead the programmers but I don't do the work for them. If I do have to do work, I do it with them. It's very much their system and if they don't want to work on it then it'll be broken.

It depends on the team, the mentors, and the students. I'm sure other mentors and other teams do this, and I'm sure there are other teams and other mentors who help the students less and make them do more work.

It definetely 100% depends on the team. I've seen other teams where their scouting software was custom written entirely by one of their mentors (and I know this because I overheard them say they couldn't do xyz because their mentor was busy with another commitment and couldn't do it until the next weekend). [Developing scouting software is a great excuse to learn to deploy backend systems, develop native and web apps].

With my former team software was always student-led. We had a mentor show us the ropes with git and and he'll work on helping people who are stuck. I think you can evaluate a team based off how they do at an event off the field. If they can still make changes to their codebase or robot then they're fine, but if they say "Mr./Ms. ____ isn't here so we can't deploy any changes" then that's really concerning.

It really depends on your mentors. Mine were very hands off, approached the whole thing with the Socratic method. It felt like shit to go on the field and get dominated by teams who’s mentors designed their robot, but we learned a lot.

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