What New FIRST Programmers should be taught

[Dustin Shadbolt]

I agree with everyone here. You just need to teach to their own learning styles. Seeing you have 4 kids, it should be easy to teach them programming. They could split up the more complex topics and then work as a team to put it all together in all program. This is how it is done in the real world and it would definitely help them learn to cover their own parts. Using your own code could be a benefit, I know when I started programming I used a lot of open source code or snippets from other teams. (I had no previous year's code to work with). After time I would start to see better ways to code it, or i would see errors in the code it self. You could possible mess up some of your code so they can learn to find it and fix it. Tell them they need to plan everything out and have a running chart of what needs done and what's done. And again just make sure they all have FRC Java on a laptop, so they can work/learn at home!