Session 0.3 – Pre-camp Programming Primer
We recommend you take a look at the following resources prior to the first day of camp to help kickstart some ideas and familiarity with the Java programming language
When camp officially starts on Monday morning, we are going to start throwing a lot of information at folks very quickly! We don’t have much choice, given the large amount of content we are trying to cover in just two short days.
This means it is something of a “crash course” and we are not going to get to spend as much time on the fundamentals and basics as we would otherwise like.
This will be like taking a foreign language bootcamp, like French, right before a vacation to France. We will cover the core words and phrases you need to know, but we’re going to have to skip over some details about grammar rules and sentence structure. The goal of a language crash-course is to get you speaking just enough to navigate the essentials like ordering food, asking for directions, and introducing yourself. Similarly, in this camp we will focus on the programming concepts you’ll need to actively participate, build, and collaborate on your team’s robot, even if we can’t explore every topic in depth.
So the more familiar you can get with the basics ahead of time, the smoother and more rewarding your experience will be. Even just learning some terms and having them in your mind before we explain them at camp will help pre-heat the cognitive juices and help make you that much more ready to quickly intake the rapid-fire information that will be coming your way.
To start, please watch these introductory videos on the core basics of Java, the main programming language used on FRC robotics. Don’t worry if it doesn’t all make sense the first time you watch through it, the idea here is for some of these concepts and terminology to not be 100% brand new to your brain on the Monday morning of camp.
Note that this is a playlist of 10 short videos totaling about 30 minutes collectively, click on the X/10 icon in the upper right to see the whole playlist, or go directly to it here: Java Tutorial – YouTube
If you are quite serious about really learning programming, you can spend some time prior to the camp trying out some of the tutorials and embedded examples and exercises that go along with that video series:
If you get through most of the pages of the first section then your foundational basics will be well on their way, leaving you more room to focus on FRC Robot-specific content during our two days at the camp. Beyond the first section, things get more complex fairly quickly but there could be some good reading things to touch on such as pages on Methods and OOP concepts.
Again, don’t worry if this stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense the first time you see it. A paragraph of French text wouldn’t make much sense the first time you see it either, but it will get your brain started on trying to understand it and it will be easier for it to sink in when we get to the camp and your brain is seeing it for the second or third time, instead of the first time ever.
This is our first year of trying a primer ahead of the camp, so give it a shot with whatever time you have available and let us know how far you get. It will help us further tune for next year!
Published @ June 4, 2025 2:54 am