[Oblarg]

Make sure that your programmers don't only know programming. I've found that ensuring programmers have a healthy understanding of electronics and mechanics serves several purposes:

1) For those students who don't continue with programming (there will be many of them, trust me), it provides a much easier transition to productive work elsewhere on the robot

2) For those students who do continue with programming, it makes them far better at their job - you can't program all that well if you don't understand the mechanisms that you're trying to control.

3) In general, I think it is good pedagogy to have every student have some level of understanding of all that goes into making the robot function, even outside of their specialization.