[AndrewN]

If you have a range of ages, you "pair" new programmers with experienced programmers. It's called "pair programming", whenever you write code you have two programmers looking at it as it's being written. One writes the code, the other watches and asks questions. Having to explain your code to another person helps clarify what you are doing and leads to less bugs. It helps transfer experience from more experienced to lesser. Either of the two people can be doing the coding and switch it around every hour or so.

You can fairly naturally divide the team up into "drive", "game mechanisms", and "autonomous". With two programmers on each task, that's 6. Another person (experienced) could be responsible for providing test builds and downloading to the fabrication team. Writing small pieces of code to test the mechanisms quickly without getting in the way of the other programming pairs.

It also helps if you can separate out last years controller for the programmers to work with on the bench instead of on a robot.