I'm in my school's robotics club, and we just received arduinos , so we need to investigate how to program them, and I found the Arduino official software, and this one from RobotC, my question is, what's the difference? Please be as detailed as possible, thank you.

Arduino Software: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
RobotC for Arduino: Well you know this one...

Thank you very much in advance.

Here is a really short description of the differences.

The official Arduino SW (C++ for Arduino) is compiled and run as native AVR code. Of the code that is actually running, this is the fastest at run-time (programming in assembler would usually yield faster run-times, only because you have better control over what actually gets run).

ROBOTC for Arduino runs the program in a VM, and I assume it uses a byte-code-interpreter. This allows multitasking, but suffers from decreased speed (because of the overhead), and is also subject to other resource limitations.

It's really just a matter of what suits your needs. C++ for Arduino is completely free, but ROBOTC does offer a 60-day trial period. I recommend you try both, and form your own preference.

Wow, thanks a lot! That really helps me out. I really appreciate it, thank you again