Thread: Improving the experience of programmers and the effectiveness of code
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Unread 17-12-2009, 12:01
,4lex S.'s Avatar
,4lex S. ,4lex S. is offline
University Mentor
AKA: Alex Strong
FRC #2702 (REBotics)
Team Role: College Student
  
Join Date: Dec 2007
Rookie Year: 2004
Location: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Posts: 195
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Re: Improving the experience of programmers and the effectiveness of code
On my old team, we had a problem with not having programming mentors, or mentors who even understood programming. Our computer science teacher was on the team for about 1/2 the years we competed, and we did decent work for those years, but when completely unguided our work got mediocre in comparison to everyone else at our regionals.

I don't know if this is a general problem in FIRST, but it would be nice to have more software engineers and computer scientists mentoring teams.

In addition to this, I think educating non-programming students and mentors is important. I know that last year, our teams leadership tried to force a switch to LabView, despite not having any programming experience, and meeting stiff resistance from both our programming team and others who knew programming. I think if they knew what we were talking about more, it would help ease cooperation.

Most programmers understand the basic mechanics of the robot, but most mechanically oriented team members have no clue what the programmers are doing. Of course there are exceptions, but this is what I found on my old team.
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FRC 2702: REBotics 2011 Mentor ::: FRC 1006: Fast Eddie Robotics 2005-2009 Alumni ::: FLL 4050: 2004 Alumni