As another rookie programmer, I can't explain the details to you very well but might be able to help you past some rookie mistakes. This picture would be moving the robot during auto using a flat sequence structure.
You can either use a flat sequence structure or while loops to do autonomous. Make sure you call the motor every 50ms or so -- if you tell it to do something once every 3 seconds or so, it will shut off after 0.5 seconds. Also, I've heard excessive while loops (bad stop conditions?) will bog up the processors and make it run slower. If you encounter this, fix that.