[jtrv]

I just finished my last year of high school, and have been a programmer for my team during my sophomore, junior, and senior years. I took 2 years of Java courses at my school, including the AP CS exam. We gained our first programmer mentor in 8 years at the start of my junior year, and he was a college freshman at the time.

We've won engineering awards at nearly every single competition (maybe not in one or two of the competitions) we've been to since 2012, which is 8-10. No national champs.

So with some decent experience, I'll ask you a question that may give you some insight on the 'state' of FRC programming:

What is Big O? I've never heard of it.

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The fact is - many, many teams do not have any insight to advance programming techniques at all. Many teams don't even have access to the basic fundamentals. For gods sake, this year we started using abstract stuff for the first time. We knew what how it all worked, but we never bothered implementing it.

We are one of the few high schools lucky enough to have programming classes at all. A close friend from another nearby team said his school doesn't have any programming classes at all, and they didn't have a programming mentor for multiple years. I'm not sure if they even have one now, but I know they didn't several years ago. How can you expect kids to figure out these 'standards' when they're teaching themselves basic syntax and struggling to understand the concept of the networking system being used in FRC?

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I think there is a very, very large disconnect between mentors on CD and the students on their teams. On some teams - like many in this thread - there are very, very large expectations to meet software and programming 'standards', whereas other teams do not even have the slightest clue on the 'norms' of this stuff.

Sure, you can say 'Get your programming teachers at your school to mentor!' Well, yes. But it's not even that simple. The teachers who teach programming courses here are math teachers and know Java and only Java. Additionally, expecting them to dedicate incredible amounts of time to mentoring is a ridiculous expectation. Mentoring is a LOT of work. We're struggling to find someone who will be able to handle the paperwork we go through each year. We aren't exactly in an area with a booming tech industry, and I'm sure many other teams are in the same situation.

Additionally, many teams struggle with building the robot in the first place. Sometimes teams are lucky to test their bot before week 6 begins. It's an immense amount of pressure to get a robot near fully functional in less than a week.