programming prep

[popnbrown]

As Subteam Captain, I figured that instead of calling pointless meetings during off-season, I would get my kids be able to program anything. Most of the kids that joined Programming, the team in general (the new ones atleast) had no prior knowledge of anything. Some were taking a course in Visual Basic, which does not really heavily touch on concepts of programming. Therefore, I decided what better to do than run my own C programming class. (Our team also does side apps, mainly in Java run by my colleague and he used to teach Java). I've been programming for 3 years now and last fall I started calling weekly meetings, where I would spend an hour teaching a new concept to kids. To be honest, I pretty much used a few books as the groundwork for a curriculum. Best part was assigning homework, which some kids actually did and some just copied and pasted (showed me who really wanted to learn).

I started off with the basics of programming languages, not real in depth of history and stuff but what programming is and everything.
Then I move onto writing a simple program on the board and dissecting it, to show them what each part meant. Told them to write a program to what I did.
I continued with teaching them what types of major variables there are and what values they hold. I gave them basic homeworks such as create two variables two be some numbers and then display those numbers.
I then went on to Control Flow (ifs, whiles, fors, all the good stuff). the Control Flow took two meetings to get into their head. I gave them hw to print out from 0 - 100 Celsius and its conversion into Farenheit.
At that time, winter break was about a couple weeks away and I decided to get them more involved in Robotics Programming and told everyone to familiarize themselves with the WPILib Documentaion(we used WPILib for the 07 bot), being the insanely good kids they were (I did not expect them to) they read the entire documentation. I gave them each a part of the code that we had written, and told them to comment the file so that if someone like our mech subteam captn was to read it, they would understand what was going on. (I thought them how to comment sparingly yet fillingly ) At that point they had a decent knowledge of our 07 bot code and basic C programming.

Throughout build season, I gave them tasks such as researching on different sensors and utilizing them for autonomous. Unfortunately we switched out of WPILib and couldn't use any of the code they wrote (even though it was wrong, we couldnt test it) but I hope to call a meeting soon and continue making sure they are familiar to be able to program and maybe make them program next year, so I can go volunteer on the field and chill with other teams.

Even though they are changing the control system next year, I think it is still important to learn a strong language such as C. Many of the kids I taught, find Java and C++ much easier because they know basic programming concepts.

Any other questions PM me,
Sravan