Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

Maybe I should retract or qualify my statement that "it doesn't matter what tool you use." Dropbox is probably a decent solution for CAD, but in my opinion, it's a poor choice for code. Unless you're using Pack-Rat, it doesn't indefinitely keep track of old versions or allow you to compare them. At best, you'll still end doing things like zipping up a copy of the code each day and giving it a datestamp. Having a solid understanding of the diff and merge tools associated with VCS software has helped me a lot both at school and at work.
A real version control system is somewhat harder to set up and requires more conscious effort to use, but it's a move you won't regret.

Sorry for hijacking the thread...

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

Thank you for the information. We are currently evaluating it and haven't decided on it yet. I'll probably suggest we go with a Google Code type repo for our code. I used it for FRCFeed and liked it.

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

We were lucky we did VC this year, at Pittsburgh, in the practice matches we were going to enable our ball recognition, but wanted to test it, so we sent it to our dashboard. But it had major bugs, and caused the robot to at some point stop recieving commands, and drive forward full speed (and its a fast one!) for a second or two, then start twitching. Back at the pit, I quickly diffed the previous version to the new version, there were two differences, vision code to zomb (dashboard), and a number tweak so our robot would be bit more managable. since another match was about to start (3 or 4 matches apart), I restored the previous version, downloaded it, and no problems! (later I figured out it was the vision code, somehow it was effecting the motors)
Subversion doesn't need a dedicated hardware server, just a computer that can have apache or svnserve installed on it. We have a "Code Master" computer that has apache and svn installed, and is the main dev computer, and the others just hook up to it if necessary (switches are nice at competitions, no wireless to worry about).

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

I agree with Andrew Schreiber. A problem that I had this year with training was that I focused too much on the language and not enough on reasoning and problem solving. I would suggest learning about the people you're training, and see how they learn best.

I agree, source control is immensely important. When I joined the team three years ago, "version control" meant "datestamped folders". Last year I was in charge of setting up SVN on googlecode, which wasn't used as much as it should have been. This year, we used it a lot more. (There are quite a few people on software in 166) Unfortunately, we had some issues with the internet, and so over the summer we're converting to Mercurial, which is also better because it supports branching, and unlike Git, is built for Windows by the HG team. It saved us big time at Battlecry, when our robot stopped working right before a match and we had to go back through the revisions to find a stable one. With SVN, it would have been harder because it's not distributed.

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

Git does require servers for sharing and what not, but I think Git would be easier in case I don't have a server, which may not be often, but it's just something else that I have to do. It'd be just easier.

-Tanner

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

guys, if you want to argue about VCS's please make a != thread

would the following game help explain programming theory?
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Plea...s/manufactoria

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

For robotics programming teaching I last year gave the people I was supposed to teach the following game

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Coolio_Niato/light-bot

A pretty good algorithmic game.

Apart from that we started from the basics of good programming, proper code writing, OOP and such. Than we moved on to showing them the libraries and intorducing them to how they work and how to use them.

Re: What New FIRST Programmers should be taught
 

If you're team is planning to use or considering using WPILibJ, there is a coding game called robocode at http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

It actually uses templates (Simple and Iterative robots) very similar to the WPI Libraries, and there robots and standardized and virtual - and if you have 4 students you could have them program bots to compete against each other (the robots are basically mini tanks) without having to build a kit-bot or something for them to play with.