[LauraN]

I'm doing some "create your own mechanical engineering major in robotics" at MIT, and I've gotta say, I think it's pretty lame that getting a mechanical engineering degree at MIT barely requires that you know how to turn on a computer. Of all the undergrads here who must be seriously interested in robotics, I know of exactly one other who is getting a degree in MechE- they are all strictly EECS people.

I didn't know the first thing about computer science until I took an introductory class in it this semester, and I'm STILL intimidated by it. I remember wiring the control panel for my team's robot in high school and passing the project off to our programmer guy. I was utterly amazed when the thing actually worked. The programming was quite literally a black box for me- I had NO IDEA how it worked.

Part of that is because computer science is so abstract- I had no idea how to do it, I couldn't literally see it, and from what I heard it was supposed to be really hard- like only really smart, hardcore hackers could do it or something. Anyone who's been programming for years is probably laughing at me right now, but it's the honest truth. I think a lot of people feel that way- so teams with limited programming skills are unlikely to obtain more and even those that have skilled programmers are unlikely to give them a whole lot of support if the other members don't understand what kinds of pressure they're under.

I completely agree with you- programming is much more important in robotics than is reflected in FIRST, and that should change.

But quite honestly, I think there's a problem with computing in general- there's a pretty big speed bump between the utterly clueless and the novice programmer, and that's more than half the battle. This is a big concern of mine, so excuse me if this gets a bit preachy, but I think it's our responsibility as mentors, engineers, and technological innovators to make computing, programming, and computer science more accessible to the average person before we start expecting rookie teams of high school students to build entire robots from scratch and program them with autonomous state estimation and mapping algorithms.