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Re: Organizing a programming team.
We struggle with a similar problem every year. We get a batch of new students who know nothing about C or programming and it's up to us turn them into productive coders. The best advice I can give is start them out simple. Find a small piece of code with well defined inputs & outputs and walk them through it. A good example of this is turning the pump on & off, or actuating a solenoid when a button is pressed. Then get more elaborate. The key is that you need to create a function or a block within a function that has well defined inputs & outputs and very rigid requirements and then the team needs to write the code for it. You can either work as a big team or partner the semi-experienced programmer with a newbie and see what they churn out. It's difficult because you have to keep one step ahead of everyone and plan out the evening's code before you get there. That's what we're doing; we (the mentors) write the function skeletons, including comments explaining what each section of code should do, before the meeting and have the students write the code and test it during the meeting. It's worked so far.
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