[GeorgeTheEng]

There are 2 more things I would like to add to this topic. The first leads into the second.

At our school, there are no classes in programming of any kind. The closest they come is a web design class and html is nothing like C. That being said, it falls on me to teach the kids what they need to know. Last year we only go one 4 hour session to go over programming prior to the season. Not enough for the kids to understand it well enough. So did I do the actual programming, yes. But I tried to do it in such a way that they students were involved and understood something. As much as possible, I hooked my laptop up to a projector and worked on the code with the kids. Explaining the decision process and having them help determine how it was going to work. Is that "having the students do it" No, I admit that. My goal this year is to make another step in that direction. Did the students learn? I beleive so. The indiciated to me that they learned something. Sometimes what the mentor has to or doesn't have to do is a product of the environment and what kind of team they are on. (though the goal should always be to improve the students skills, thought processes, and experiences)

That being said, even though I am a professional programmer, I do not work on a daily basis with anything similar to stuff we do on the robot. I work on PC-based simulators that simulate the interfaces between military systems. I don't work with microprocessors directly, I don't have to deal with interrupts, setting pins, or worrying about memory space. To me, the whole robotics experience is a stretch and something new. So while a lot of us have degrees in engineering, I'd claim that the only real "professionals" are one who work with this type of stuff all the time. I think most of us would really be in the experienced amatuer category.