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Originally Posted by Vince
I would appreciate any leads on schools that could be featured in the paper because of their successful integration of FIRST in the university environment. If you could provide the contact information of the university faculty member from such a team, it would be most appreciated.
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Vince, I believe you know Professor Staab (staab.1@osu.edu) at The Ohio State University, so perhaps you're familiar with our OSU FIRST team, which has been in existence since 1996. We have a web page with a little information on the effort at:
http://www.osufirst.org/
We actually have three FRC teams, and we expect to take on a fourth FRC team next year. Additionally, we have a number of Lego League teams.
We've won a number of regional awards on each of the different teams over the last few years. This year, one of our teams (1014) won the Engineering Inspiration award at the Pittsburgh regional. This was partly because we incorporated a strong controls curriculum into our program this year that involved giving the students basic knowledge of PI(I)D control and the applied math behind it and partly because so many of our students expressed a desire to continue into engineering.
Professor Staab can give more details.
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Originally Posted by Vince
In addition to hearing about the university’s success with FIRST on all levels (eng. outreach, recruiting, scholarships, regional host, summer camps, …) I have an additional interest (i.e. a 2nd paper in the works) in learning how participating universities integrate FIRST into their curriculum. Any additional leads on the topic of students getting college credit for their FIRST work are welcome as well.
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We've always had a FIRST course available to help FIRST mentors receive credit for their work. We additionally hold fall seminars for all of the central Ohio teams to come and help bring every member of the team up to speed on particular topics of their choice.
However, we're trying to formalize things a bit more. Now we're adding a course in the fall that meets regularly to discuss FIRST planning and adding a little more continuity between the teams. We'll then be requiring more for our winter FIRST course as well.
Again, Professor Staab can give plenty of info on this. The only other thing I might add is that we're trying to use FIRST as a testbed for some of our other labs here at OSU. For example, the foundations of the controls work we did this year on team 1014 came out of a graduate level robotics class a few of the mentors took. We used some principles, curricula, and overall lesson plan and problem approach to help us develop controllers for the 1014 robot, which not only included drive train speed control but position control of a two-jointed articulated arm 8 feet long that could not only pick up balls but place hooks onto the bar to lift the robot up. There are videos of this arm available on the FIRST website given above.
Let me (pavlic.3@osu.edu) or Professor Staab (staab.1@osu.edu) know if you need any other information. I'll send him a note about your message as well.