Also, students focus on individual success and achievement because that success is important for college applications. However, in industry there is no one right answer. Also, priority is put on the success of teams and individual contributions are seen in context to the success of the team project. All tasks are equally important, and each one is necessary but may result in different experiences being received by each team member either due to past experience or due to capabilities. To overcome this difference in experience, the VCS mentor for the junior high team returned to the classroom environment after the project was delivered and brought everyone up to speed on programming, electronics, and hardware design. Other mechanisms for providing an equal learning experience are team meetings.

In industry "rapidthe task was not done on time. In addition, email/texting was not effective in soliciting feedback in a timely fashion on the owner's understanding of the task.

Eventually, the team leadership evolved to an industry model (our mentors were from industry), where the discovery of progress was done through a "one on one". This was owned by the co-lead and was done, either in a face-to-face discussion or alternatively through a phone call. This spontaneous form of communication allowed the co-lead to solicit the task owner to "playback" their understanding of their current task, correct misunderstandings, to seek clarification of progress, and to catch subtle hints that there might be a problem arising, "text and forget" messaging. In summary, task owners always had to confirm their understanding of their