Robotics Curriculum?

[Aren Siekmeier]

Ideally, you want someone with experience using the machines to demonstrate and walk through students through the procedures. In the new shop we shared with 3130 this year, we had all kinds of new tools (lathe, bandsaw, plasma cutter, mill) we didn't know how to use, but the school's shop manager gladly helped us through all of this. It should only take a lesson or two on procedure and then some supervision.

I'm not much of an electronics person, but I think the manual often has lots of useful information for the parts and what wires to use etc.

Solidworks has a good set of tutorials built in that our team uses. They should be located right on the Help menu. I find them very useful still, as they cover everything from the basics to motion simulation and stress analysis. I would start with the first ones. They are group into sets titled "Introductory" something or "Basics," and will get people familiar with common sketching, extrusion, relations, mating, and other methods. And it would probably help to at some point have them work on their own projects to put some of the knowledge into practice before the season starts. Another thing to maybe touch on is version control (modularity helps), as this is important to have down in the heat of the build season when multiple people are working on different parts of the robot.

This thread pertains to LabVIEW training:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=85675
Not sure about C++ (we are about in the same spot as you for making such a switch). This year to introduce students to LabVIEW we just walked them through our previous year's code, explaining how everything worked. Most of them had had some experience with RoboLab in FLL, so they caught on ok.