Quote:
Originally Posted by jpetito
This is difficult, and in some places impossible: find a shop teacher. I mean it.
It's one thing to do CAD till zero dark thirty visualizing some marvelous machine, and quite another to build the thing to the vision. And critique and tweak the engineering drawings into something you can actually build...
Shop teachers have the skills in their hands and head that will get you started, or at lest tell you what you don't know and then what you need, and the sources to acquire it.
It's beyond unfortunate that we have in many places thrown out vocational education and its curators, thinking we will send all kids to the university.
PS- having access to a shop classroom with all the weird gear and such would be nice too...
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I'm actually the shop teacher for my school. I'm in the process of building my industrial arts program from scratch (acquiring machinery, developing curriculum), and I have 20 years' experience in woodworking, and 5 years' experience in metalworking. I am a new arrival to the world of FIRST and computers, however, and am not an engineer, nor am I especially CAD-minded.
I'm currently working through my credential, which will allow me to legitimately teach, but I know that a significant component of teaching robotics as a class is having a curriculum. I can't conceptualize of a way that I could teach FIRST as a 9-month class, and so I'm looking for how I could break it down into its various constituent parts (electrical, mechanical, programming, etc.) and teach those, with culminating benchmark projects that can be used to loop students back into the culminating project (building a competitive robot).
I'm wondering if anyone who is a teacher can help me with curricular suggestions, anyone who is an industry mentor can suggest activities that can be used to make more transparent the various subsets (e.g. basic wiring and electricity, for example, as I've never taken physics), and anyone who is a student who can point out to me what their teachers do or did that made robotics a valuable and rewarding experience.