Something that struck me the other day, after this event. Usually I’m terrible for giving people computer advice that causes them to shout at me and burst into tears, but on this occasion I didn’t find this a problem. Why?
This is a case of the so-called cross cockpit gradient. Putting people with radically different levels of experience or knowledge, or indeed radically different perceived levels of experience or knowledge, together and asking them to accomplish a task is often a bad idea. Whoever is more experienced tends to either under-use the less experienced team member, thus leaving them to kick their heels and getting stressed, or else to dump on them. In the other direction, if the more experienced partner makes a mistake, the less experienced is likely to be inhibited from pointing it out.
In this case, I think, I knew as little about the NAO programming environment as my partner and therefore we were equals.