Quote:
Originally Posted by Goldfire
This is my first year involved with FIRST (joining other mentors with more experience) as the programming mentor. We have team of 30-40 students, of which about 15 are interested in programming. They range in programming experience/knowledge from nothing at all to halfway through AP Computer Science. My personal experience is quite deep in C/C++ and non-existent in LabVIEW. I have no experience with robots of any kind.
I'm looking for suggestions of how to organize my students. Would it make sense to split into some who will specialize in LabVIEW and some who will specialize in C++? Should they all learn both? Is this an unmanageable size and should I work to encourage some to find other pursuits?
|
Assuming you are already meeting in the pre-season, I would recommend using the time to bring everyone up to speed with the tools available. We have decided to go with Labview - so have installed the Labview 8.5.1 (available free to FRC teams) on several machines and the students are independently working through some of the simpler tutorials.
Comparing Labview with C/C++ and Easy/C - only very exceptional students with actual C experience have found it easy to use text editor compilers such as MPLAB, while students with Visual Basic experience have some important basic knowledge (data types, etc) but because they all lack robotics/control system experience FRC is a total mystery until they are immersed in the environment for a number of weeks. Most of our potential programmers find icon-type programming such as with Easy/C more understandable, and are telling me their comprehension of simple Labview programs is similar ... although when we get beyond the simple and have to think of multiple things happening at once, they will once again fall off the track of understanding for awhile.
As we have been involved with FIRST for several years, we have the luxury of spare robot controllers/etc and have built several new platforms this fall with different drive systems plus having last year's robot available. Some of the programmers are reviewing the Easy/C code from the past couple of years, and implementing their own primitive control systems with the joysticks using Easy/C ... this is familiarizing them with draggable/configurable code blocks which has some equivalency with Labview. I understand from beta-Labview teams that the kit of parts this year will include a similar draggable icon library for Labview.
Some of the replies here talk about version control systems - that's too advanced for us, I will just have individual programmers work on Labview VIs independently (eg: joystick input and scaling, motor speed control with encoders, pneumatic arm control with limit switch) and convert them to subVIs, then have one or two of the programmers bring these subVIs together in the main program.
Hope this helps
