[David Lame]

If you are dealing with students who have absolutely no conventional programming experience, my advice on teaching Java is to download Visual Studio Express, and teach them C# for a few weeks. The languages are practically identical at the beginning level.

The advantage of Visual Studio/C# over Eclipse/Java is that the development environment is much easier to deal with. It's easy to set up Eclipse wrong and end up with something that doesn't work at all, with the problem being some obscure checkbox behind the scenes that no one would know to look for. Also, Intellisense on C# works better than its equivalent in Java. Finally, the easiest programs to work with for object oriented programming concepts are ones with a user interface, and Windows Forms programs are very, very, easy to write. Once they get variables, functions, classes and objects down, it will be fairly easy to transition over to Java and the FRC environment. Sure, they'll have to start typing String instead of string, but that's an easy transition.

Of course, I'm a Microsoft partisan myself. Programmers are notoriously religious about their favorite tools and languages, so a lot of people will think this is absolutely terrible advice. However, in the little bit of teaching I have done to absolute beginners, I've just found C# easier to deal with.