Open FIRST Mentor Notes is a list of practical processes, ideas, and tactics for mentoring FIRST Robotics Teams.
These notes are intended to be general enough that they apply to any team looking for help, but specific enough that you can apply them to your own team.
There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to think about your time as a mentor.
One is Discovery, where you encourage students to just try out cool ideas and help them to learn more. This should be fun for everyone -- it helps to hook the students onto the engineering process. The off season is a great time to focus on discovery as there is no pressure to perform.
The other is Production, where the goal is to produce something using the knowledge you gained during discovery. This is often boring because you already know everything that needs to be done, you just have to do it. There's no discovery, no exploration, no solving previously unsolved problems, nada. This process is less fun than Discovery, but the payoff is much better since you will have produces a cohesive, working system at the end of it.