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Bob Mimlitch here at VEX Worlds again. We're talking to a team about mentoring and why mentoring is important. This is Team 4154X. They've won Excellence awards. They've won Robot Skills awards. I think you were a finalist last year.

Yeah, we were. So it's great that you're doing really good. But VEX isn't just about making a great robot and winning. No. It's about helping society and your local teams—

Yeah, 100%. Do better. So what is your philosophy on mentoring other teams? Mentorship is crucial. And just before I talk about other teams, I'm actually gonna talk about ourselves. In eighth grade, a huge part of us becoming a better team was our mentorship from our seniors and upperclassmen. It was a big part of the game.

And then, in terms of helping out other teams, 'cause we have so much experience now, it's our fifth year, we need to give back to the community. We wanna make sure that the VEX Robotics program goes on forever.

So you're a good team—

Yeah.

Because you got mentorship—

Yes. Absolutely.

From others. And was this coaches teaching you or students teaching you?

Both. Both. Both, okay. And now, you're giving back and you're returning it.

Right. Yeah.

Are you seniors?

Yeah, we're seniors. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so. Last chance to—

We're done.

Give a big push, okay. All right, so what do you do next? So for we actually work with Lauderhill. It's a city next—

South Florida.

Yeah, it's a city right next to us. And we work alongside the police station, and we host events for robotics. It's a community outreach program. And we do a lot with them. We show them how to program. We start at the VEX IQ level, and then we let them drive our robot for optimization. They can find their own style of driving.

Ah. And I think it's a really cool experience to just give back. Because we're so fortunate to be able to build these robots at our school and everything like that.

Yeah. So let's say you're talking to a new team.

Yeah, yeah.

Never built a robot before. VEX IQ.

Yeah.

What do you start with? Do you start building or do you do game anal—where do you start? You plan. You start from the basics. I would start by looking at the game, looking at the game elements and seeing what you wanna prioritize. Certain game aspects have more point values.

Yeah. Okay. So specifically, even for this game, I would say scoring just in the high goal versus scoring it in the low goal, pretty big difference.

Yeah.

One point versus five points. You need those. So you never even tried to do the low goal?

No, exactly, exactly.

Okay. So I think what you're saying is, pick the thing you think's gonna make the most points. And optimize it. And start with that.

Yeah.

Don't try to do everything on step one?

Mm hmm

Just do one thing.

Yeah.

I like that, okay.

Yeah. I could follow that. And I would say, you gotta start with your chassis. A big part of the game is your chassis, and it needs to be sturdy. Like I was saying earlier, you need to make sure your motors are, they have Loctite in 'em. You need to make sure they're using lock nuts everywhere. Lock nuts provide a lot more support than typical Keps nuts.

Yeah.

With often vibration with the robot, you need them to stay on. One screw can screw up the whole robot. Now, that's VRC, not VEX IQ.

Yes, not VEX.

What do you do in VEX IQ to make sure things are structural and stable? You need to make sure you have the pins in and not just one or two of them. You need to make sure you have everything braced properly. Even on this bot, even though it's all metal and we have screws in multiple places, that translates directly to VEX IQ. When you have bracing, you need to make sure it's not falling out in all these places. As well, using collar locks on your axles. You don't wanna have those slipping out. Making sure your motors are attached correctly. Making sure your weight's balanced. There's so many things. Even though VEX IQ is such a small bot, there's so many things that can go wrong still.

So you need to make sure that you're planning that accordingly when you're going through your design process. One of the things you mentioned was using a lot of pins. During prototyping, you only use enough pins to put it together. Exactly. This allows you to build fast without wasting materials. Like using Kep nuts at this level, while you're doing that, and then later on, you probably take it apart and put a pin in every single hole. Exactly. Those are the secrets.

Now you've got a team, and they're starting to build. What's the next step? For your chassis, another huge tip that I'd say—and we tell this to everybody—is that every axle you have on your wheels, in the beginning of the season, a long time ago, in eighth grade, we had our wheels exposed. We didn't have supports on the other sides of the axles. For your drive base, you can't have axles that aren't supported on the other side. If my wheel right here didn't have this seat channel, the drive base would fall out. There'd be no more wheels. They'd fall out. I see a lot of teams make this common mistake, and it's easy to fix. You just have to make an H. You have to make bracing around both sides of the axle.

We've talked a lot about how you engineer your robot and how you help teams engineer their robot and learn. That's all part of mentorship. The detailed part of mentoring involves helping teams with their engineering. But the higher-level part of mentoring is either finding schools that have a team and offering to help or starting a new team. What's your philosophy on spreading VEX as far as you can and helping as many people as you can? I'd say the biggest thing is probably just, like he said, we have that community outreach program. We actually had a local public school in our area, and one of the coaches was present. He said, "You know, I really like what you guys are doing. Can you help me start a team at our school?" And we said, "Yeah, of course."

We went over to his school and brought a couple of parts over. He had his students in the media center. We wanted to go over just some stuff about actually grasping the engineering aspects of it. These robots, when you see the complete product, look very intimidating. But when you break them down, they're actually pretty simple. By teaching them a few concepts with the chassis, learning how to build an intake or a shooting mechanism, learning how to analyze games, recognize point values, and keeping an engineering notebook to track your process, they are able to grasp it on their own. This way, when they're working with their teams later on, they actually build it themselves. They get a little bit better on their own, and then you build a self-sustaining team.

Excellent, so you're helping this one team that wanted to start. How much time did you put in? Definitely a lot. Once a week or multiple times a week? With our own middle school team, because we work in the same room—it's a K-12 school—I'd say at least one hour, 30 minutes a day. An hour or two a day, yeah. They're always finding us after school. So when they're meeting, you're probably there helping them. Always. Do you end up doing as much as the coach mentor? Are you doing more than the coach? I'd honestly say we actually don't; we try not to touch their bots at all. It's a student-centric program.

Remember, VEX is student-centric. It's better if a student is helping than a coach. We don't even want coaches touching robots. But even in your case, you're taking the right road.

We don't touch them at all. And saying, "I'm gonna help you verbally."

Yes. "But you're gonna do."

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well so- And research says that it's the act of touching and moving things, the hands-on thing, that helps the human brain learn. And if you don't do that, so you guys are really doing a good job there. Yeah. When they're building, we just try to make sure they'll build something that might be a little bit slanted or it might have the wrong spacing. We'll say like, "You know, this has to be a little bit more straight," or, "Hey, take a look at this. You know, that probably won't work well in the long run." And they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, all right," and then they'll go and fix it themselves. You teach about trying. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and that way, when they get to our age and seniors in high school, they'll probably be able to be a little bit better than us, which is the end goal always.

Oh, that is a great goal. I like that idea, make sure that the next generation is- Is better than us. Okay, so last question has to do with team roles. I know you're an engineer on this team. Yep. You're a coder on this team. But when you're mentoring teams, how do kids find out what role they take and what role they want? How do you help them through that process?

First, we kinda start by asking them what they like to do. If they wanna learn how to drive, they gotta practice it. And if they wanna learn how to build, you gotta be hands-on like you were saying. You really can't become a good builder if you don't fail and try again and try again and try again. I can't even tell you how many times we just stared at this robot in absolute puzzlement. Yeah. You have to do that as a team to find your role in the team. And some people wanna become programmers, and that too, it all just takes trial and error and just doing it over and over again.

I think that there needs to be a good split on a team. You can't, every single element of, every single role, it's key, it's key to a team. You need to have a notebooker, you need to have a programmer, you need to have a builder, and you need to have a driver. That's what makes a good team.

So those four, you don't really need a leader? How does leading- You need a leader. You need a leader. Okay. I'd say a good thing about a lotta teams is, even though we have technically captain roles, the great thing on our team is that everyone's opinion is valued the same way. And in that way, when we're actually talking with each other, you don't have to deal with situations of like, "All right, I'm the captain, we're doing this," and everyone's kinda like a little bit bad about it. When you have that collaboration aspect, with everyone on a team having a key role and knowing exactly what they can do, having their specialties, you create a better product. In that way, you also have a better team composure, better collaboration, everything's so important.

Yeah, and even with the whole key role aspect, every single part of this robot in terms of the building, the programming, the notebooking, it all has, everybody goes into it. Yeah. Every part of this robot has been touched by every member of this team. Excellent. And it's a huge part of the game. Especially programming, he couldn't do it without us. Driving, I couldn't do it without them. We need each other on this team. It's- Excellent. Collaboration's everything.

All right, so we've heard from them about mentoring. It sounds like they're very passionate about it, which is amazing, giving back. That's very impressive.

So thank you so much. Yeah. And thank you, we're here at VEX Worlds talking about mentoring. Have a great day.

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