[MAldridge]

I would suggest that if you have one person who has programmed the robot before, keep them on it. Then take the top 3 from the rest, and have them 'shadow' the programmer so that they can see how it all works, and the lead can hand off small projects to them, such as compressor code or the like (assembla has free perforce hosting which makes this easy).

I would say that if they haven't programmed before, you will see at least 50% drop off the programming group, as it has what a friend once described as a 'vertical learning curve.'

Also: put people at work learning with some of the new robot simulator code, but only if you have full mechanical teams already. I am one of the lead programmers for my team, and I am speak from experience that labview is difficult to learn if you haven't programmed before, but I will always try and steer programmers in training towards mechanical during build season if it will get the robot to me faster for debugging.