In January I may be joining a robotics group and will need to know at least basic programming. I need to know where to start. I don't know what language this will be in.

Welcome to Cemetech! If you're going to be using the Norland Robotics kits, your program will be in TI-BASIC. I'm biased, but I recommend my TI-BASIC book, and I'm actually chatting with the founder of Norland about possibly making a more official link between my book and his robots. We also have a variety of shorter tutorials in the community. Would you care to Introduce Yourself when you get a chance?

Do you know any computer programming languages already? If so, it will be a little easier to comprehend calculator languages.

To start on a calculator language, first start with Ti-BASIC (the built-in language on the calc). It's relatively easy to understand, and you can actually do a lot with Ti-BASIC.

There are several tutorials online about Ti-BASIC
To get started:

Turn on your calculator. (Press the [ON] button)

Then press the [PRGM] button. You should see a menu that looks like this:

EXEC EDIT NEW

Use the arrow keys to scroll over to the right 2 times. The NEW should be highlighted.

Press [ENTER]

Type in a name for your program. If you look carefully at the keys, there are green letters above some keys. Press those keys to enter letters. The name of the program cannot be more than 8 characters long.

Press [ENTER]

You should see this:

PRGORAM:PRGNAME
:_

The _ is where the blinking cursor should be.

Let's try a simple Hello, World!" program first.

Press the [PRGM] button. You should get a menu with this at the top:

CTL I/O EXEC

Press the right arrow key ONCE.

Press [3]

Now you should be brought back to the PROGRAM editor screen:

PROGRAM:PRGNAME
:Disp _

Now press the [2nd] button

Then press the [ALPHA] button

The character entry mode is now letters. Now type this in using the keys:

"HELLO WORLD"

The screen should look like this:

PROGRAM:PRGNAME
:Disp "HELLO WORLD"

Now press [ALPHA] again.

Now press [2ND] and then [MODE]

Now let's test your program!

Press the [PRGM] button.

You should see this:

EXEC EDIT NEW
1:PRGNAME


Press [ENTER]

Tadaaaa!!!!
You just made the Hello World program in Ti-BASIC!

Depends on what competitions you're joining. I assume it's probably FIRST Robotics -- in which case, it's a question of whether or not you're working on the smaller-sized robots (FTC), or the larger ones (FRC). For FTC, you should look into learning both Labview and ROBOTC. As for FRC competitions, many teams use either Java, C++, or Labview -- if you need to learn the basics of programming ASAP, starting with Labview may be your best bet.

yay my calc says hello to me

I'd suggest fooling around with the DISP command, and then I would suggest you looking at how to make a simple "What is your name?" program.

Great! Did you see my comments about introducing yourself and other programming resources in my first post? As per my and Ashbad's posts, do you know anything about what kind of robots you'll be working with?

I think the robots are made from vex robotics kits.

Also. I get how to do a simple program to display a word now. It's literally one line. How to i get it so i can hit a button and it will display what i want it to only after hitting the button? I fooled around with the input and output in that list of different things (the list with disp in it). nothing good happened lol

The Pause command sounds like what you want to use. Input is for getting a number, string, list, or matrix from the user; Output is like Disp, but puts the thing you Output at a specific location on the screen.

that is little bit more complex (although still very simple) since it's is more than one line and the fact that you want to do something IF a certain key is pressed and do something else IF a different key is pressed. Thus you have to test for a key, find the key that was pressed, and do something corresponding to that key. 3 Things.

Run this piece of code a couple of times

Code:


If you press a button it will display a number and if you press a different button, it will display a different number. Turns out every key has a specific number associated with it, so if you replace Disp K with
Code:
(21 represents the button "2nd") then you have tested for a key.

Ok this might be a dumb question but where are the keys for > and = and other symbols?

The TEST menu has the items that you want. You can access it via [2nd][MATH].

ok so I entered his code, i get an error

Please write more complete and descriptive posts. For example, show the code that generated the error, say what the error message was, and tell us what steps you took to (unsuccessfully) try to solve it.

"Error # 514
BASIC EX Err: SYN"
i feel like i did something wrong and not him, i'm not sure what.

That's short for "Error: Syntax", which means you wrote some code that the calculator doesn't understand. Perhaps you need more of a guide; may I (biasedly) suggest you consider a book on the subject, or perhaps some tutorials?

I'll see if i can get my parents to order that book. That other website is blocked at school

I wrote it myself, so feel free to add that fact. I'm sad to hear that TIFreak8x's site is blocked, though; he has some good tutorials there.