How to choose programmers?

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by pyroslev

But if you insist on a test before competition to see if they're ready, try this one on for size.

1. Put them in a room with a robot, robot control system not even imaged. (Simulating swapped C/RoboRIO)
2. Give them laptop with the IDE on it with the most basic template for the language you're using. (Simulate programming laptop having died)
3. Give them one hour. (About the average time between matches at competition)

To completely pass it, they must reprogram said robot to be as close to competition ready as possible. If a student programmer can complete the above and the possible drive team be able to be competitive with the robot, then that student has earned their weight in pizza.

I'm going to resurrect this older thread, because I was reading through it and this post made me laugh... this is pretty much exactly what happened to me as a new mentor!

At my first meeting they said "So, you're interested in helping with programming? Cool, go see [mentor]". He handed me a package he had just received that day... a set of I2C addressable LED strip lights, an Arduino board, and a power supply. My directions? "Take [students] and make this work!"

In the remaining hour and a half I had to find a laptop, download the Arduino IDE, drivers and sample code for the LED strips, figure out how to wire it all up, debug a wiring problem (turns out the power supply connector polarity was backwards!) and... yes... we made it work!

On my way out another mentor shook my hand and said "Well, you did pretty fantastically for your first time out!"

[GeeTwo]

We did tryouts this year for the first time. Everybody who didn't make varsity last year had to try out (tryouts were given by members and varsity). Everyone had to do all the tryouts, including some mechanical, wiring, and programming tasks. We kept track of both attitude and aptitude. We selected members primarily on attitude, and assigned them to departments based on a combination of aptitude and their preferences. We know we always have to get a lot of programmers to start, because there will be those who don't properly engage or get it in a couple of months. Some of these leave the team (most just stop showing up; we get this in every department), others move to other departments.

[faust1706]

We've only ever had 1 programmer for the cRIO / roboRIO. Granted that programmer has been able to do some pretty good stuff, but still only one, despite how much we beg and plead students to help her.

In 2012 the mentors decided we were going to put the kinect on our robot. The mentor that was behind this already knew exactly how the problem was going to be solved, but wasn't going to program it for the team. The solution required a strong math background to even understand, so the programmer (me) was forced into the role, even though I had never programmed in my life.

This year we got a huge influx of people who wanted to program, all of them being freshman or sophomores too. So they went through the intro to c++ class notes from a local engineering school in 2 weeks and they were good to go for the most part.

Sadly, we don't have the luxury of picking students for roles. It's really whoever steps up. We did have to establish a few dev rules this year: don't pull code for more than a day, if you push code and it causes a bug or error, fix it immediately, just typical stuff you'd follow in a dev job.