Preparation

Before using the FRCSoftware.org Learning Course to teach your students, make sure you have an adequate understanding of the concepts covered. The best wya to do this is to go through the course yourself; however, the level of involvement with which you do so is dependent on your previous knowledge. If you’re new to FRC programming or Java, we recommend going pretty deep through the course as much as you can, at least so you’re ahead of the students you’re helping guide. If you’re pretty experienced with Java and FRC programming, you might just go through the Educator’s Guide to get a complete overview of the course and caught up to date with practice.

Note

While the commands v3 library retains many elements from the v2 library, there are many significant changes that impact how it is used and how to best structure code. If you have experience with commands v2 but not v3, a deeper dive into the v3 library is recommended.

In particular, familiarizing yourself with the development environment, tools, and git is going to be particularly helpful to ensure that your students can focus on the code itself. Additionally, having such software on your own computer will allow you to demonstrate things for students without impacting their own code.

Final Advice

1. Remember that is is ok for students to be at wildly different sections of the course.
2. Even if a student just gets through stage 1, they would have enough knowledge to be somewhat helpful and easy to guide during build season. The more sections they complete, the more autonomous they should be as a developer, making them easier to lead to complete a task.
3. When helping students, make sure ot not handhold them too much. If you’re in a situation where you can get the student to solve a problem by asking some guiding questions, do that.