September 24th: Robotics Meeting

Today was alright.

We had a robotics meeting today. As it turns out, the adapter didn't come yet for the encoder, which sucks, because there's nothing to code. I had already gotten them started with the most basic coding in Java, because I wanted them all to program and read values off of the encoder. Anyways, at that point, since nothing could be done in Java, and we were going to switch to C++ afterwards, we decided to start teaching them the basics of C++. We used onlineGDB so that they could program, and we taught them std::cout, data types, and variables. At that point, a lot of them were getting a bit confused, because some of them had never programmed. My friend, who was helping out with programming, and I decided that we must've been going too fast for beginners, so we brought the issue to the attention of our advisor. He said that we were going way too fast, and he wanted to model the teaching style of Code.org's APCSP curriculum. At that point, we began bringing up how we were taught C++, and I showed him the textbook that I used over the summer for my class at the local community college, which our advisor approved of. We began teaching at the very beginning of the book, which was "Why Program?" Our advisor thought that we had gone too far back. He couldn't correct our errors of our teaching style at the beginning of the meeting since he was busy. He told everyone to get started with the most basic principles of programming, by doing a free online course of their choosing, Most of them chose Codecademy's C++ course. 

Anyways, hopefully they'll be able to understand everything!

Thanks for reading,
Issac