[Alan Anderson]

We program pretty much whenever it's legal to do so. There's a flurry of coding early on as we put together the structure to control what the concept is supposed to do, then a slower pace of changes to adjust to mutating designs and operator console decisions, followed by a bunch of tweaking as the robot hardware gets to the point of being controlled, and finally a few days of frantic automode programming.

This year our team has the software mentor (me), one main student programmer, and three other interested students who sometimes sit in on programming sessions.