[Greg McKaskle]

Teachers are one possible source of mentoring, but so are engineers and technicians.

FRC is quite different from how I think of CS classes are normally taught in high schools. FRC is part realtime, part feedback control, and the remainder being composed of scientific/mathematical/engineering tasks such as cleaning up noisy sensors, building state machines, and mathematical transforms to match mechanical or electrical constructions.

The robots I see within FRC don't have a database, don't draw circles and squares using a turtle, and don't have grids of rocks, flowers, and whatnot that morph over time. Also, the issues that happen on the robot are rarely isolated. "Our robot code has a problem", invariably involves a wiring glitch, mechanical bind, toasted motor, missing jumper, scratched encoder disc, and sometimes a logic or race condition mixed in. This is incredibly similar to the type of SW written by NI customers, the majority of whom are not CS.

So don't limit yourself to computer scientists or computer science teachers.

Greg McKaskle