Leveling the Playing Field with Curriculum - let's make it happen

[JesseK]

There are a couple of things fresh in my mind after the SeaPerch symposium last week so I'll share my initial thoughts on this. To meet national standards for acquiring Perkins Grant dollars for this curriculum, you'll have to match each unit to a national standard. There are other requirements as well.

As an example, you could view what MIT has created for part of the SeaPerch curriculum (9-12) pertaining to the national standards. The caveat: I can't say that every piece of it applies to FRC since it's a completely different program with different motives and methods. So when creating a curriculum you will need to truly understand the motives behind FIRST FRC and how they differ from the MIT curriculum.

The key differences: FIRST robotics are great for industry interaction with education for land-based robots that foster high levels of thought and profound innovations amongst all ages whereas SeaPerch is great for being extremely inexpensive, underwater, micro-macro scalable, and easy to implement for children. Both inspire the next generation to become engineers, whereas FIRST also takes it a step further by trying to persuade our overall culture.

1885 is up to it's ears in robotics curriculum sometimes. If you have any specific questions, I can ask the person who wrote our local SeaPerch, VEX, (new) FLL, and Tech Ed curriculum for specifics.