Hey guys my school has been doing a lot of "firsts" in competitions and I've been a part of every one of them. We're going to a programming competition and it's gonna be pretty cool. Anyway Ive been looking at some of the coding and it looks pretty weird. Is there something I could use to practice the coding? It would be great if anyone could get me started on this because we don't have any of our equipment yet and all the people on our team know NOTHING about coding except for one, and this is really different for me coming from batch and VBScript. Any help appreciated.

Thanks for the question. One great place to get started is here: http://www.education.rec.ri.cmu.edu/pro ... index.html You'll find a ton of helpful tutorial videos that explain the system and the programming.

If you don't have the actual VEX hardware yet, you can practice on a virtual robot: http://www.robotc.net/download/rvw/

Is there some nice simple reference guide that a mentor can download to get up to speed on the VEX Cortex RobotC system?
The online multimedia is all well and good for slowly working your way through things as a noob
but I've been programming in C for over 30 years, I just want a quick reference guide so I can help the kids get going

Mahalo

Check out the ROBOTC Help Documentation. It lists all of the functions and lots of other info that you can use self-paced.