[Donut]

Last year our programming team had 9 programmers (with me as lead) and 2 programming mentors (one is a programming teacher at another school, the other is my Dad who is a software engineer). By the end of the season we had 5 programmers doing quite a bit and the others kind of helping.

This year looks to have 5 or 6 programmers and me leading again. I can say from last year's experience that having 9 programmers is a bad thing. We simply did not have enough tasks to hand out and supervise between them all since the skill level varied drastically and we really couldn't figure out what we wanted to do fast enough.

We don't require our programmers to have a certain level of programming education, but we tell them that if they haven't at least taken an Introduction Programming class that they will probably get left behind unless they're willing to do significant outside learning.