[Skinkworks]

As a participant and finalist in this competition last season also, I highly recommend that every person mildly interested in programming participates. There are many things that FIRST teaches, and Zero Robotics teaches different things. For example:

1. By the end of the season, you will end up with a second-nature familiarity with vectors, no matter how bad you were to start.
2. You will also learn the finer points of game theory, as the cooperative element of the competition is very different from FIRST.
3. FRC uses a fairly capable programming platform, with a decent amount of flexibility. The Zero Robotics API is very limiting, and you have to write in C90 (no variable declarations in the middle of a block, among other annoyances)
4. The focus on programming is much greater than that of FRC, since there is no physical robot. Our code last season had to account for every possible action the opponent could make, and ended being a fairly complex state machine.
5. The simulation environment that your code runs in was fairly deterministic last season (this will probably change in the coming season). Programming deterministic systems is different from a FRC robot, where nothing happens twice the same way.

Again, the Zero Robotics competition is pretty amazing, and I think every programmer out there should look into it.