should there be a award for programming skill?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by njamietech

But I still hold my ground in that many students in FIRST are more focused on finshing their code than the ethics that goes along with it. And while I was on 624, I saw the same situation happen over and over again: there would be a logic error in the code or even a runtime error, and it would take an hour or more to find the error.

My point was that we need a way to encourage students to write their code in a way that makes it easier for them to debug and prepares them for college and their career.

and while an award may or may not be the best way, the need is still there.

How about having a professional programmer look over each team's code? One programmer could foreseeably look at several teams in one area. So you get a dozen or so at each event, they look over the code and make suggestions. One restriction, though: Can't look over your own team's code, if you're on a team. Offer constructive criticism to help the team out. If he says, "I can't make heads or tails of this", then you know you don't have enough comments, descriptive variable names, whitespace, etc.

Hmm, even before the events, too, maybe.

There are competitions that have this sort of thing on a regular basis, though maybe not in programming.