The standard way to see which direction a motor is turning is to look down on the motor from the top, not from the perspective of the motor. Those methods give opposite directions, so this is important.
Let's imagine that we want to make a robot car with two motors, one on each side, to allow for forwards and backwards movement as well as turns. We grab two motors, both of which spin clockwise when powered (as an example; many FTC motors actually spin counterclockwise):
We'll put one on each side of the robot, and if we give both motors positive power, then it should drive forward, right?
One motor is spinning towards the front of the robot and the other is spinning towards the back, so our robot is turning in circles. If you look closely, you will notice that they are both still turning clockwise. The imaginary clock from the perspective of each motor is flipped relative to the other.
To solve this problem, we will determine which side of the robot is the front and reverse the motor which is spinning towards the back. For FTC, this is done during initialization when we set the direction of our motor:
motor.setDirection(DcMotor.Direction.REVERSE);
It might be helpful to manually set the directions of all the motors during initialization for clarity.
public void init() {
...
leftFront.setDirection(DcMotor.Direction.REVERSE);
rightFront.setDirection(DcMotor.Direction.FORWARD);
leftBack.setDirection(DcMotor.Direction.REVERSE);
rightBack.setDirection(DcMotor.Direction.FORWARD);
}
Now our wheels spin the same way!
Of course, there are occasionally more complicated situations, such as perpendicular motors, motors running through perpendicular gears, and motors with an odd vs. even number of gears in their gearbox, but now you know how to think about it and figure out which direction they go.