Teaching "C" to 2006 students??

[cbolin]

Hi,
To programming mentors and senior student programmers.

The nationals are next week. After that, thought must be given again by team 342 to developing newbie programmers into "Autonomous Programming Wizards" for 2006. Once more, we are losing our experienced "C" programmer to college.

Now, this seems to be a major issue for lots of teams since I see a whole lot of mentors programming their teams' robots. Many mentors don't have students with a programming interest nor the time to invest in training them.

Sooo...

I would like software that allows the student to write legal autonomous "C" code and to test it with a 'virtual robot'. The program would be friendly to the newbie programmer and not intimidating. I want them to be able to open and run sample programs as well as writing and saving their own examples. They could take this home. It would include a "C" programming tutorial and "Autonomous" tutorial so they could self-study. Further, it would be cool if this program could be made available to all teams for free that needed it.

The objective of this software is that the students could practice during the year at home or school. They could then sit in front of MPLAB with the 2006 default code, jump over to user_routines_fast.c and begin developing autonomous code to meet the teams requirements (with a little help from these forums and their mentors).

Is there anything like this that is immediately available for the students?

Would you like to use this if it was available?

I am working on such a project but would like to get some encouraging feedback before I get much farther along.

Attached is a simple screenshot showing what I have done. The gobbledegook in the bottom blue window is an intermediate virtual code to run the 26 mSec engine. The robot isn't doing anything yet.

Regards,
ChuckB