Robotics Curriculum

[Workingclass]

Hi,
We are currently teaching a roboticscurriculum at our high school. the class uses Leggo NXT, VEX and we use the MIT Handy Board as an autonomous DCU along with the VEX platform. Students are taught the basic physics and equations needed to calculate their results, but the class is taught as an applied engineering course. We give the students a task to design and build for then the have to present their results. Welooked at several premade robotics cirriculums but found that they really did not give students the opportunity toreally experience a real world engineering enviornment.
This year is our development year, so we really have not written a specific curriculum, but instead thought about the different things that a student needs to know and understand about designing in the real world rather than the lab enviornment. The year is broken into units starting with Kinematics then Dynamics(work/energy),Electricl circuits(Ohms law), Motors, Actuators, digital Electronics, Digital Contorl Unit/Hardware, Software, Programming, and System Engineering.
The final few weeks of the year are set aside for students to Design and build a robot to perform a completely autonomous task. Our hope is to teach robotics as a system that is autonomous and self correcting rather than just another radio controlled toy.
As I said this is our development year and so far it has been a great success. The hardest thing to do is to let the students figure out solutions through discovery rather than stepin and give them advice or correct where they might be going in the wrong direction. When students present the results of their projects through each phas of the course they are required to analyze what worked and what did not work and why