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Originally Posted by Matt H.
Both of these statements worry me. I see not having students interested in programming as a challenge to overcome, not a challenge to circumvent. As a student programmer I find the idea of a mentor doing the programming sickening. I'm decent at programing and I've put much time and effort into doing the best I can. However, I've done this under the assumption that I would be competing with other students not mentors. I believed that my skills would be put to the test based on the skills of other teams not their mentors. This is my first year of FIRST, but I have already put in large amounts of off season time towards the programming side of things. I would hope that my efforts are not in vain because I am competing with adults.
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Don't worry about it. Since '04 our robot has been programmed by a professional software engineer, we've never had anything impressive, and it was an uphill battle to get any code changes. Remember, adults are also often busy, reducing the time they can program. He would often say something to the tune of "We don't need that" when a new bit of code was requested. And it was full of errors, plus his code had no comments. It was still useful that he did it, which freed students to try and finish building the robot on time, but his code easn't superior in any way, shape, or form to the other robots this year, most of whom, I assume, were student programmed.
As for autonomy, I would like to see three wildly different starting areas to make teams come up with either a brilliant all-purpose autonomous, or multiple ones.