Programming Languages used in High School Robotics

[intellect7]

Hey everyone, because I have lots of free time over the summer, I have decided to take up learning a programming language. (I have never programmed). I am leaning toward Java, because the ID Tech camp I am going to teaches primarily in Java.

However, in the next academic school year I plan to join the robotics club at my high school. I know that in robotics clubs, you do not only build robots, but you program them to do tasks.

I would like to know what programming languages are used in your/most high school robotics clubs when competing. Also any other suggestions for programming languages to learn that have nothing to do with robotics.


-\Theta\Sigma

 

[Smed]

Though I don't have direct experience in high school robotics, my guess would be that their either using assembly language or arduino, which is C programming. If you want to know exactly what they're using, call your school.

I would recommend buying an arduino and working through the many beginner projects over the summer. Even if this isn't what the school is using, the skills you learn will be valuable and will translate well.

 

[jedishrfu]

If the controller is a raspberry pi then the language would be python.

Both platforms arduino and rpi have good intro books by Orielly pubs in the Getting Started series.

Also both platforms have starter kits arduino osepp kit $50 on amazon and rpi starter kit $104 on adafruit.com

 

[bigaggie]

Yeah, Python's probably the easiest to learn and apply to robotics, as jedi pointed out. However, if you find yourself wanting to get really hardcore and want a more difficult challenge, C++ would probably be my second choice.

 

[Integral]

FIRST robotics, the high school robotics organization, uses a National Instruments cRio controller. While they encourage the use of Labview for programming it is possible to use C or Java,

 

[HHOboy]

In our high school we used VEX robotics kits and those were running C. But when I was in that class I was also in a java programming class and found the two languages to have many similarities so it was a lot easier to program in robotics even though they were using a different language.

I doubt that your school would use raspberry pi but it could use arduino which is similar to java and C. So I don't really think you should learn python

I would go Java or C