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Unread 19-11-2015, 21:54
stopyourself stopyourself is offline
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FRC #2335 (Sargon)
Team Role: Leadership
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
Rookie Year: 2013
Location: Prairie Village
Posts: 35
stopyourself is on a distinguished road
Re: Requesting help with developing classes in Japan

I've been in several CAD classes and two high school Engineering Design classes. On my FRC team, I've been a jack-of-all-trades, stepping in to learn and teach wherever it is needed. The team's years during my high school career have been spent reclaiming what was lost due to seniors' senioritis and mentor turnover. I've been helped by other FRC teams in my area (thank you again programmers of team 5013) and assisted others.

The most boring part of room 105 for me is guided instruction. I understand it is necessary, but it moves at such a slow pace. Somewhere out there, there's an organized way of enabling students to move at their own pace without missing any components of the lesson. I haven't found it, but some we've created some ways of alleviating the boredom. We built a classroom library full of STEM related books; my favorite is Elon Musk's biography by Ashlee Vance. We make lists of CAD projects, programming alterations, and offseason projects (BOM required) that either need to be done or just-for-fun. Thankfully, I also now have the freedom to move and work at my own pace! I'm doing an independent study project to build and test swerve drive; I can work from home or at school, go to the hardware store, or consult with mentors from Honeywell whenever I need.

One of our problems in the past was student retention. We now include small-team robot building during our pre-season training and it has helped tremendously.
We have an alright number of girls. I read somewhere (Brandeis study? FIRST's published statistics?) that 80% of girls in STEM focus on business/fundraising/outreach. When I was a freshman, I thought that I didn't know anything because I was a girl, so I chose not to focus on the building aspects at first. This gives each member a basic level of training in EVERY domain of FRC. It changed something: 75% of girls in our school district now say their favorite part about being on the team is getting to work on the robot.
Younger members also felt that they were not given the opportunity to work on the robot. They were taught at such a slow pace they were bored. Not only does this give them an initial team-building, hands-on project, but also allows us to give them the proper supervision. Once our younger members pass all of our safety requirements, they are allowed to use all tools and their opinions are equal to those of upperclassmen.
We tried a number of pre-season projects: the popular pneumatic t-shirt launcher, the robot rebuild, the VEX duels, the two-liter rockets during a summer camp, building planes with motors powered by current on metal track, etc. Students seem to like them all (the long-term projects teach MUCH more!) but we've settled on choosing an old FRC competition and splitting new members into groups to compete. We don't even have a real field, but it's fun to have a mock competition between two plywood bots.

I'd say that any STEM related class needs to have students turn around and mentor the subject matter/concepts to younger students. Not only does it help students retain information, but personally I think it has the most value. Our team members love mentoring our FLL team and are just as excited when they succeed. We go to events all throughout the year to teach younger kids/the public about our robot. I'm a senior now, and a student leader, and nothing tells you whether or not you know something than teaching it to others.

We occasionally hear of our own alumni, though only one has returned to visit regularly, and they are all successful. It would mean the world to me if they ever visited and, well, even just sat down and talked for a bit.
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