Here are some of the comments we’ve received! Some comments were written to founder, Robin Lee, about the adult overreach on Team 2910 and about Robin’s formation of StudentsFIRST.tech.
- On our team the mentors and adults arent allowed to touch the robot. The literal whole point of FIRST is for students to compete and learn. – Anonymous
- I feel lucky that our mentor is as lenient as he is with letting us mess around, I wish for so much more of the same around FIRST.- Anonymous
- It takes a brave person to bring something like this forward, and though I have my doubts about FIRST actually doing anything about it, I genuinely wish you luck. As a coach/mentor on a team that is mostly student run I want all students to have a great experience in FIRST and wish you only the best. – Anonymous
- I strongly support your cause – Anonymous
- You are doing the right thing by letting everyone know about this. Don’t let your lead “mentor” tell you differently. – Anonymous
- My team’s mentors were always very hands off, it was all about learning for our team. Mistakes are important for learning too! – Anonymous
- Thanks for reaching out. We’ll email FIRST and our Coach will email FIRST Washington. We totally support what you’re pushing for. We noticed that there is too much of a focus on winning at all costs and not enough work to ensure the teams are student-led in FIRST. We are trying to push for reforms that would address this because it is an equity issue. Keep up the good fight! – Anonymous
- I definitely support kids doing the work. When I started with FIRST, it was explained to me that the adults guided (by showing and helping some of the time), so that adults ended up doing about 20 percent and the kids did 80 percent of the work. That seemed reasonable since some of the kids had no experience with tools and programming and whatever. But I have seen many teams that it’s almost reverse of that. A Houston team actually told our team that they didn’t touch the robot at all until it was time to learn to drive it. That’s insane. They are, of course, one of the top teams. Their NASA mentors did all of the building. – Anonymous
- I feel that Woodie and Dean did not intend for mentors to build for the students and that they would also want this problem addressed. I had the opportunity to talk to Woodie once. He was super nice, and he’s loved talking about all of the great resources for kids to learn. They really mean it when they say it’s not about winning. The learning is supposed to be the winning part. – B Johnson
- I applaud you for your efforts. As a teacher, mentor, and having over 21 years mentoring in the FIRST universe, I understand the importance of having students ‘do the work’. I also know how intimidating it is to be able to speak up freely knowing the culture you are in. You are showing courage and responsibility by speaking up about this given your circumstances. I know first hand of teams from FLL, FTC, and FRC who have mentors who dominate the workspace. I shrug my shoulders and simply pride myself on the fact that I know the success of our team comes from the students. I hope your campaign to allow students to speak up is successful and that students on the team are allowed to participate more directly. The rewards of doing the job are much greater than the awards that are won. It sounds like you have great support across the FRC world and I wish you all the best in your mission.
- I just heard about your situation and it saddens me so I would like to be counted as a supporter of your project. Kudos to you all for initiating change.
- I know this is a problem everywhere. I always instruct new mentors and team members to pay attention to what goes on in the pits. I tell them that whoever you see working on the robots the most are the people who built it. If there are no kids in the pits when things go wrong, they’re doing FRC wrong. When things go wrong, I provide guidance when asked, and then I leave the pits and let the kids do their thing. It’s their robot and their learning experience!
- I am ardently opposed to any sort of mentorbotics. It’s inequitable and defeats the point of the FIRST Robotics Competition. Students should build robots, not mentors. It would be like adults playing on the high school football team for adults to build the robot in FRC.
- Destination Imagination has a great set of rules for adult involvement and it would be wise of FRC to look to them for guidance
- As someone who has been involved in FRC for the entirety of my high school career, there are few things I value more than the skills and experiences that I have gained while on a team, many of which I would of missed out on if my team wasn’t “student-run”. Our mentors, while passionate and knowledgeable, do not step in to design or build the robot. They instead act more like consultants who recommend organizational or decision making strategies. Even all of the behind-the-scenes stuff like coordinating with school admin, setting up fundraisers, gaining and retaining sponsors, communicating with parents, managing monetary accounts, etc. is left up to the student leadership team. While this approach has earned the team its fair share of criticism, it has overall allowed them to preform to a very high caliber in an extremely inspiring environment uniquely akin to a real workplace. While I recognize that this approach will not work for all teams and is greatly dependent on the character of both the adults and students involved, I sincerely hope that your team can improve itself to the point where all members are once again excited and motivated to genuinely participate.
- I’m sorry for the situation you find yourself in; that’s miserable and not in the spirit of what FIRST is about. I’m not sure the solutions you suggest to address the problem would help, however, because it’s hard to see how they could be enforceable. I approve of the idea of having a code of conduct for adults, and I hope you can get that implemented.
- If this is implemented by FIRST, include a form where students can prove mentors have broken these rules and be punished for it.
- If adults truly come to a HIGH SCHOOL robotics competition and seek an unfair amount of influence, especially as in the case with 2910, thats quite honestly pathetic. Such a thing limits the opportunities given to the thousands of students giving their lives to helping their team and fairly using mentors as a guide, not an advantage.
- On our own team as well, I’m also concerned about the level of adult control building the robot . Kids’ ideas are often discarded in favor of the mentor’s ideas.
- As Much as I support the idea enforcement of these rules would be incredibly difficult. I still really support the idea
- Maybe for teams there should be a budget max so teams with less funding can have the same amount equality with finances on their team.
- FLL has rules in place for this, I feel that similar guidelines should exist in all FIRST programs
- We see the same problem in our area. The coaches/mentors teach the students after the robot is built how to drive it. Since the beginning as head coach/mentor, I am a firm believer as much as possible for students to do the work unless it is something dangerous. Our mentors do help guide the students, as mentors should, but the students do the majority of all the work from start to finish. Thank you for courage for taking this task on.
- Thank you for speaking out. I can assure you that mentor involvement is a problem for teams across the globe, and this is an important step to fixing that.
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