Curriculum for training students?

[jwhite]

Due to turn over, we've got a fairly young team, build wise, without a lot of accumulated student build wisdom. We (the mentors), were thinking it would be nice to have a set of build 'lessons' for the fall. The idea is that we'd have a set of fairly simple, discrete steps, each one of which contributed towards a whole robot. For example, say one step is to frame a chassis. You'd have a bucket of parts, instructions, and then we'd hope that a new student could accomplish that task in two hours. Another task could be to put together a gear box, and so on. A student 'mastering' all of the lessons should now be ready for most basic robot construction. The hope is to break the learning curve down a bit so new students can more gradually become experienced.

I imagine that others have created such curriculum, but my (admittedly somewhat brief) google fu didn't turn up anything obvious. I saw this lovely new forum topic, and thought, what the heck, I'll just *ask* <grin>.

Pointers to resources, or other suggestions very welcome.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[2789_B_Garcia]

Our FRC team has a class, and our school is a Project-Based Learning environment. I'm in the process of guiding my students through revision with their documentation, and I was planning on posting it on here to get feedback on the work we are doing. I'll put a link up here as soon as its done, in the meantime, I've heard the Robowranglers have some pretty amazing stuff. Have you checked them out yet?

[ehochstein]

Hi Jeremy -

I see you are from Saint Paul. Dunwoody College of Technology hosts weekly training sessions during the fall, I highly encourage you to send some students/mentors to check them out. Not only are they free but we are working on getting scholarships for students that attend these sessions. Send me a pm and I can get you some more specific information for next year.

Evan

[jwhite]

Originally Posted by 2789_B_Garcia

Our FRC team has a class, and our school is a Project-Based Learning environment. I'm in the process of guiding my students through revision with their documentation, and I was planning on posting it on here to get feedback on the work we are doing. I'll put a link up here as soon as its done, in the meantime, I've heard the Robowranglers have some pretty amazing stuff. Have you checked them out yet?

I'd be curious to see what you've got - it sounds great.

I just visited the Robowranglers, and I found some good white papers, but nothing along the lines of a project based curriculum.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[rsisk]

The WPI ThinkTank has a ton of great content: http://thinktank.wpi.edu/Portal

[2789_B_Garcia]

Click HERE for an example of the documentation we use for our projects from one of my students. He was in charge of iterations of the blocking device we slapped on our robot for week 1 semifinal matches at Hub City to play against the full-court shooter from Team 2468 (whom we very much Appreciate!). Our projects are all based on our team's design-process, and our documentation model is a visual representation of the work that is formatted to fit on one A3 size sheet of paper (inspired by Toyota).

Students are assigned a variety of topics that are documented throughout the year. Sometimes the topics are game specific, usually the leaders of our team will take on broader & more "long-term view" type of projects. Like I said, I'm working with the kids on revisions right now, as soon as they're a little more polished (hopefully by the end of the week), I'll post them up.

[itsjustmrb]

Thanks for the posting and sharing of information. Rookie teams and 2nd year teams with limited FIRST experience, like us (4063), benefit greatly from the posts on Chief Delphi. Now that we have 17 months of FIRST under our belt, we are looking at award submissions for next year and the information and examples presented here are a great starting point for us.

Thanks again,

Mr. B.

[2789_B_Garcia]

Thanks! Posting and sharing our work also helps us get feedback on how we can improve our methods and documentation. Everybody wins!

[Alex2614]

A couple years ago, we designed a FLL-style challenge with FRC robots, with an L-shaped field (very similar to the hallway in our building, oddly enough )

Anyway, we broke the kids up into two teams (Phobos and Deimos), and the challenge was to go retrieve an object from a box (out of sight, so they needed cameras) and bring it back. We mostly used parts laying around the shop. Whatever we had was fair game.

Obviously, you don't need to have something even remotely similar to what we did, but the whole idea of an off-season "competition" of some kind is a great way to round out whatever curriculum you have set up.

[jwhite]

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

[Jon Stratis]

I've found the best way to train is to jump right into it. Come up with a project you can follow end to end with a specified deadline. Why not look at your robot, and decide to add something to it for one of the off-season events, like MRI (Roseville, a little early in the fall) or the Minne-Mini (Prior Lake, a little later in the fall)? I don't know what your robot is like off the top of my head, but build a full court shooter mechanism for it, or a pneumatic 10-point climber.

If that doesn't work, have the students design and build a robust battery cart. Have them build some sort of practice robot (ever done mecanum drive? This could be a great time to try it out!), or even a driving chassis you can bolt stuff to later in the season to use as a practice robot.

With any of this, you need to help break it down into discrete steps for them. If the students aren't yet capable of doing so themselves, come into each meeting and spend the first 5 minutes laying out what you want to accomplish and how it should be done. Make sure they can see the end goal from the beginning, and how their work each night contributes to it.

If you want to chat, our team would be willing to share some details from our summer and fall programs. We're local too, so sitting down and talking through it might be the easiest way!

[Jon Stratis]

A large part of our 2-week summer camp is a mouse trap car competition. As mentors, we get to design the rules and the goals (farthest distance? specific distance? out and back? lots of options!). We show them a very bare-bones basic car that moves, although it doesn't really meet the challenge 100%. We go through the competition on the last day - they bring in their cars (most of the work is done at home), and we have 3 rounds. Everyone runs their car in each round, and there's some time (15 minutes or so) between rounds to let them make modifications or improvements, with mentor help if they ask for it. We ask every student to give a 2 minute oral presentation on their robot and the process they used to build it. In the end, we crown a winner.

After the competition is over, we tell the students (most are brand new) what they just went through. A kick off. Prototyping, testing, and building. A competition with time to make repairs or changes between matches. Presenting your robot and process to the judges. Awards at the end. Guess what... it's exactly what we do with our big robot! It's a great introduction to the process, without requiring any real machine knowledge. It's designed to get them wanting more, and to lose their "fear" of the build season.

I should note... This is only a portion of our summer program, there's a lot more that goes on during it!

[2789_B_Garcia]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

With any of this, you need to help break it down into discrete steps for them.

Completely agree. The example I posted above was one of the more 2013-specific topics done by one of our more advanced students, I'll be posting other examples from this year with topics that include "Shop Tool Maintenance" and "How To Crimp Wires." We also have projects documented for our scout sheet, defensive match strategies, our chairman's video, our basic pit layout, our woodie flowers finalist essay, and a visual for how to diagram breaking down a basic design problem. Some of them are beginner level, and the intent of the documentation is to create a portfolio that will serve as a "training/hard lessons learned" manual for new team members. Like I said, hopefully, they'll be ready for post by tomorrow, I'll put up a link to all of them as soon as I've got it!

[ehochstein]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

If you want to chat, our team would be willing to share some details from our summer and fall programs. We're local too, so sitting down and talking through it might be the easiest way!

Teams in Minnesota need to do this more. Aside from the Dunwoody training sessions, I also help run weekly training sessions for both 2470 and 3081 in Bloomington. I would be willing to sit down and talk about my successes and failures on my teams as well. I know this past season I attended team round-tables where a few mentors from the southwest metro-area would get together and talk about this sort of stuff. It is nice to talk to other mentors/teams who have gone through the same problems you are having. Also you get to meet some pretty awesome people

On that note Jon has a pretty cool program over at Visitation and they build amazing robots year after year I'm sure he would have TONS of great advice for you.

[Jon Stratis]

Evan - What do you think about trying to get together a meeting of team leadership (both student and mentor) from some of the stronger teams in the area to talk about this issue (probably sometime after States)? I'm sure I could convince my team to host such a gathering (we're moving into our new STEM center build space on Saturday, we'd love to show it off!), and we could focus less on what each of our teams does to train new students up (although we should still share that info), and more on how we get that information out to other teams. Do we put together a website dedicated to training methods? Do we divide up a list of local teams so we can each get in touch with some of them directly? The MN Splash event is a great way to reach a lot of teams in a short period of time, but it comes fairly late in the fall and doesn't have any hands-on building experience.