[Thundrio]

I am a senior and 2nd year member of my schools FRC team (our team was started last year). I was the only programmer last year, and this year I have another student I am trying to work with and one or two others I can have join me if needed.

The only problem is the closest thing we have to a programming class at my school is spending a week doing simple programs with Visual Basic in a computer science class. And while I do have a mentor I can send code to have reviewed, there is no one on site who can help me.

We are programming in Java this year, and while it is going better than last year (due to me understanding the concept of Java better than last year), I am still learning the language as I go. This isn't a huge problem for me, as I am inquisitive and patient, however the kid I am trying to teach to help me has a more difficult time with this. He tends to get upset by every single error he has, and has adopted the attitude of, "Well of course it doesn't work, it's Java". I have spent a lot of time teaching him, because my main concern is making sure the team has a semi-able bodied programmer when I leave for college.

My question is on how I can split up what needs to be done effectively. Yesterday I spent half an hour writing up a piece of paper on how to do two things I wanted him to do (create a gyro instance and make 2 joystick buttons to fiddle with it), and I gave him all the instructions I felt were needed, however it still took him fifteen minutes to code something I could have done in five (and I still helped him through most of it).

In addition to knowing what people think is the best way to teach programming while also being efficient, in general how do programming teams share the workload? Does one person do vision processing and the other does work on driving, or do people typically use pair programming?

Thanks for any advice, I wholeheartedly appreciate it.