[Joseph Bisch]

My team uses LabVIEW to program.

I joined as a senior this year, so it is my first and last year involved with my school's team (as a student...). I actually joined with the intent of being involved with the website and programming.

I was nominated programming captain and ended up being the person who wrote the program. The person who programmed last year came back to teach us, and I learned a lot during build season as I went along. Similar events occurred with the website, except there was no teaching session and I already had web design and development experience, whereas I was unfamiliar with LabVIEW.

I have been told that my team has always had issues with programming. My school does not offer AP Computer Science, so we are not able to recruit out of that class, which makes finding people interested in programming difficult. I love lineskier's idea involving the mindstorms kit. Anything hands on where people can see what programming actually is about is great.

In conclusion, I think that programming a robot is an amazing experience, even more amazing than programming a computer, because the robot moves and is able to analyze its environment using sensors. With a computer, the things you make it do are virtual; with a robot, the things you make it do are real and physical. If we make programming real to students through physical demonstrations they might find they actually enjoy programming and lose the image of the weirdo furiously typing white text into a black terminal. When they stop seeing themselves limited by syntax rules and realize that they can make a machine do what they tell it to do, that is when they really understand what programming is about.

PS @James Critchley - I'll be looking out for VIRSYS. I'm interested in seeing what it is.