Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
My theory is that the shortfall can be blamed primarily on a lack of experienced mentorship. The people who are having real problems are unable to make use of the instructions. I do not believe the instructions are faulty, but I already know what they say so I might be blind to a significant deficiency.
My experience is that some very talented programmers merely do not learn well from reading the instructions. Once they are walked through the steps and shown how to apply the tools by a knowledgeable mentor, they can do well. They just need the mentorship in order to help them over the hurdles.
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After watching my programming team over the past four years, I agree completely. For my first two years on the team we had a programmer who was nothing short of brilliant. This guy won national math competitions, and was a legend in my school of 3200 people. However, when it came to programming autonomous, he couldn't make our robot drive forward. However, he was working with no programming mentors at all.
For the past two years, we have had 1-2 mentors dedicated to programming, and the success of our programming team has sky rocketed. However, it isn't that these mentors are programming the robot, but that they are there when the students have questions.
I have lead the engineering team for the past two years and I can't possibly imagine doing it without our team of mentors. As Alan said, I think that the issue we need to address is not the actual programming language or environment, but the mentorship of the student programmers.