RobotOpen - beginner friendly?

[AustinH]

Hi CD-

I'm looking at ways to get a rural 2014 rookie team off to a great start and figured that a summer drive train/t-shirt cannon build would be a great way to give students some hands on training before our first official build season. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is going to be a controller. I'm not particularly keen on the idea of plunking down any of our initial budget on a cRIO (especially since one is provided in the rookie KOP and they're due to be phased out starting in 2015) and so I've been looking into cheaper, alternative control methods including RobotOpen or a really barebones Turnigy 9x setup. Has anyone had any experience either learning or teaching RobotOpen programming to students with no CS or programing backgrounds, and how is the transition from that to LabVIEW? Most of the interested students that I've met with are freshmen and sophomores, so I'd love to have a programming environment that is (relatively) easy and accessible to as many of them as possible.

Cheers!