Yes, but not right away, and not with a ready solution, which I will explain below…
We are lucky to have many senior teams doing early reveals every season. If a student feels lost, there is nothing wrong with an adult watching those reveals or public forum posts together with the student helping to understand design or a concept.
“Student-centered” term is frequently used in context of the Project-based learning (PBL), sometimes also referred as Active Learning or Problem-Based Learning.
There were a number of studies that came to conclusion that the best way to teach STEM subjects would be an Active Learning process. At the beginning of the class students are asked to solve a problem for which they may not have proper background knowledge. They are likely to fail at the first attempt, but will then become much more receptive to the theory and will better understand and remember it, which will let them solve similar problems in the future with much greater success. ([1], [2], [3], [4])
VRC is a great example of the Project-Based Learning, where students, faced with an interesting and engaging problem (game), are expected to actively seek the knowledge required to solve the problem. They are expected to be the driving force behind their own learning process. However, it would be a mistake to think that teaching becomes irrelevant in PBL - it is still a very important element of the process.
“Active learning doesn’t just happen; it occurs in the classroom when the teacher creates a learning environment that makes it more likely to occur.” [5]
Anyone who thinks that there is no place for the adults to interact with VRC teams beyond the very basic topics, simply doesn’t yet know how Active Learning is supposed to work.
Even though by their senior year a lot of students are more experienced in VRC specific tricks and techniques than their mentors, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing else for them to learn. And, as long as there is something to learn, there is a place for teaching.
Sometimes the best way to teach a specific topic is to let students experiment on their own, sometimes it is through an engaging lecture, and, in most cases, somewhere in between.
In the ideal case, when a VRC team gets stuck, they will look at what their peers are doing and, if they are stuck too, seek an external advice.
My priority as a mentor is always to teach kids how to recognize when they are stuck because they are missing an important piece of knowledge. Then they need to learn that missing piece, instead of continuing tweaking the same set of numbers or gears for weeks, without really understanding how it works or why it doesn’t.
I think, a lot of misunderstanding may come when people, not familiar with Problem-Based Learning process, will skip over the introduction pages right to the Green-Yellow-Red examples and could draw an erroneous conclusion that adult involvement is always bad and must be avoided.
If anyone didn’t know about Project-based learning before, I would highly recommend you to first read its Wikipedia entry and at least a couple of newspaper articles that I linked above.
Then re-read the first two pages of the Student-Centered Guide from the OP - I bet you will see it in very different light and all the terminology will start making much more sense.
I agree with multiple posters that it would, probably, be better to de-emphasize the examples section, and make introduction part shorter on definitions, but more focused on Active Learning principles, where learning through initial failure is more beneficial than winning, but failing to learn.