How to choose programmers?

[Tungrus]

I would be careful about "guys" who run off and come back "knowing everything about everything", they may cause more problems than finding solution. I would rather have someone who takes time to think about and finding a solution, this is bit vague but in short someone who has patience. Especially with programming debugging is part of life and many times its not easy. Someone with short attention span may not be the best candidate.

To get students interested in programming, we give mini-tasks to team members to program. We use Labview so our typical challenge is creating a dash board showing water level in a tank, as they make progress, we will make it more animated and add controls and alarms etc to control flow rate, and alert when tank fills up. Since they can see on screen what is happening and how controls work they would be interested. Then we step up a notch, give them cRIO and ask them to program, control pneumatic system, one step at a time, and so on.