[sanddrag]

I teach FIRST Robotics, Robotics Engineering, 2nd-year Engineering, and 9th grade Technical Literacy. I feel like I have almost everything I need to give these students a pretty good opportunity and experience. However, I may have an opportunity to purchase a few more things to really finish off the program so hopefully one day soon it will be rather polished. To describe what we have already would take me too long, but we're rather well equipped. We have all the basics and then some. I'm looking for suggestions for what to purchase to really enhance our FRC team or the classes I teach during the school day. What have you always thought "oh I really wish we had a..." ? The suggestions can be anything from large equipment to software to raw materials to consumables etc. I'd like to purchase things like motors, motor controllers, cRio, batteries, etc for FRC but it's hard to know what's legal next year.

Whatever I buy, I want it to be relevant, useful, learnable/teachable, and to last. I'm somewhat interested in re-vamping the 9th grade Technology Literacy curriculum with some new hardware/kits/activities/etc. It's a 9-week class. Currently we have about 3 weeks of computer history, 3 weeks of computer hardware and digital information, and 3 weeks of robotics programming.