THE NUMBER-ONE FTC PRINCIPLE
Student-Led, Student-Run: How We’re Approaching Mentor Involvement
FTC is designed to be a student-led, student-driven, student-run program. That phrase isn’t branding fluff — it’s how the program is judged, and it’s how students actually become engineers.
If the mentor builds the robot, the team learns nothing.
If the students build the robot, they learn everything.
The Inspire Award — the most prestigious honor in FTC and the surest path to State and Worlds — explicitly looks for student authorship of the work. Judges are trained to spot a mentor-built robot or a mentor-written engineering portfolio. They will not give the top award to a team where the adults did the work.
What Mentors Are For
A good FTC mentor is a coach, not a builder. The job is to teach a skill once, demonstrate it, then step back and let students do it — even when it’s slower, even when it’s rough, even when watching is painful.
1 · TEACH CONCEPTS AND TOOLS
Show how to use a drill press or read a wiring diagram, then hand it to the students. The first time is the mentor’s. The second time and every time after that is the team’s.
2 · ASK QUESTIONS INSTEAD OF GIVING ANSWERS
“What do you think is causing that?” beats “here’s the fix” every single time. The whole program is built on this. Students who get the answer handed to them solve one problem. Students who get walked through the question solve every problem like it afterward.
3 · HANDLE ADULT LOGISTICS
Team registration, transportation, parts orders, parental coordination. Anything that needs a credit card, a driver’s license, or a “hi, I’m a grown-up” introduction belongs on the mentor’s plate — not the student’s.
4 · KEEP THINGS SAFE
Especially around power tools, soldering irons, and high-current electronics. Safety is the one place where the mentor’s “step back” rule has a hard limit — if someone is about to get hurt, step in immediately, then teach again later.
The Numbers We Aim For
A widely-cited guideline in the FTC community is that students should be doing roughly 80-90% of the actual work, with mentors at 10-20% and most of that spent teaching rather than doing.
Who does what?
Drivers, programmers, designers, builders, and presenters should all be students. If a mentor ends up holding the controller during a match or writing OpModes the night before competition, something has gone wrong.
The Complaint Inside the Program
This is harder than it sounds, and the FTC community talks about it openly. On Chief Delphi, in judging feedback, and in plenty of post-tournament conversations, there are recurring complaints about teams whose mentors build most of the robot, write most of the code, or in extreme cases drive the robot during competition.
Why it matters
It’s unfair to teams who do it the right way.
And worse, it robs the mentor’s own students of the skills the program exists to teach. A robot built by adults wins a few tournaments. A team of students who built their own robot wins college admissions, scholarships, and engineering careers.
Judges notice. So do other teams.
What This Looks Like for a Rookie Team
As a rookie team, we expect our mentors to be more active than they would be on a five-year-old senior team — and that’s appropriate. We’re learning everything from scratch: what an OpMode is, how a build season is structured, how to read a hardware map. Our mentors will spend more time directly teaching this season than mentors on a veteran team would.
The goal: shift the ratio fast.
By the time we’re a third-year team, our mentors should be coaching less and watching more, and the students should be running the show end to end. The mentor’s job is to make themselves progressively less necessary, season after season.
THE BIG IDEA
A good mentor leaves a team that doesn’t need them.
The mark of a great FTC mentor isn’t a winning robot. It is a graduating senior who can walk into an engineering lab, a CAD studio, or a college interview and already knows what they’re doing — because they did it themselves.
Want to mentor with us this season?
Read the mentor roles page, or reach out to talk through how it works.