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Unread 11-04-2013, 12:03
jwhite jwhite is offline
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Re: Curriculum for training students?

This is great, and much appreciated, but I must admit I had something fairly specific and much more basic in mind.

That is, I want a self directed, self teaching 'curriculum' that can give the students some experience and self confidence. Most of the material I'm finding is good at helping a kid who has done some building to make the next jump. I literally want to help kids make the very first jump.

That is, right now, if we ask a new student to 'build a chassis', or study the rules, or think about engineering design excellence, their eyes glaze over and they wander off to go join the business team. It's really pretty far beyond most of our students - they struggle with knowing what a socket wrench or crescent wrench is and *why they should care*.

But their eyes light up if we ask them to build a simple field element - simple carpentry is often within their reach. So I'm trying to figure a way of breaking down the basics of building a robot into even more simple steps, so that a student can see it, and think to themselves: "I can do that!"

So for example, I imagine a box of parts, and a set of instructions to build just a chassis frame. We hand it to a student, and say "holler if you need help. Let me know when you're done" When they finish that, they're checked off, and handed a power distribution board and some wires, and the instructions. And so on, and so on, until they've built a whole robot by themselves. And maybe along the way they've tried the crescent wrench in a situation where the socket wrench works *way* better...

Is anyone aware of anything quite like that?

Cheers,

Jeremy