[Ari423]

I would say it depends on the size of your team. If your team is 30 students, having 15 of them soley working on programming is excessive. Maybe you can impose a requirement to spend a certain number of hours working with another subteam before they can start programming. If your program is 60+ students I see no problem with having 15 programming students.

My team has also had this problem in the past few years. We are a team of about 15 total, and 5 of those students all wanted to program. This was clearly not the best use of their time for the team, so we asked those students to pick another subteam to assist before they were allowed to program. We lost one or two of the students, but in the end it was much more beneficial to the team to have the extra manpower building the robot.