I am a teacher and FRC coach at a small private school and we have neither the money, nor the room for Project Lead the Way. I am considering trying to really boost the engineering curriculum in our school over the coming years and I am starting by running a VEX robotics elective.
The bots are small enough that you can have several small teams each build a bot and have in-class competitions. You can still get pretty deep into the engineering and design aspects including CAD, and it makes it fun because you can always have them preparing for a competition.
My class is structured around the VEX boot camp at first where we will have three separate in-class mini competitions. Competition 1 is focused mostly on the mechanical aspects of building. Competition 2 is focused on programming including autonomous movement and sensors. Competition 3 is a free build where I just tell them about the game and it is up to them to design a winning robot. We will probably have 8 or 9 bots in the competition. I try to run the competitions as FIRST-like as possible in order to make it a good prep for students to join up with our FRC team afterward.
If you are interested in something like this and want more info, just e-mail me at
gavin.wood@barstowschool.org