Materials for a robotics class of 30

[rahilm]

Our school piloted a robotics curriculum last year with 2 classes, and expanded it to 4 this year.

I'll start off by saying that this class primarily targets students who aren't doing so well in other science class. The aim of the class is to help those students understand concepts of physics through robotics.

With that said, our primary tool is NXT kits, with NXC software instead of MindStorms. We've written some custom programs where they can change velocities, accelerations, etc. and combine that with some Vernier sensing hardware to help them see what velocity and acceleration actually is in relation to each other. They explore other concepts similarly.

We tried incorporating FTC into the class last year, but some of the stuff just seemed to high-level, so we had to abandon that. The plan is to try once again this year, and see how well it works out.

[Taylor]

I am not a fan of the Boe-Bots; I'd rather use VEX.
Personal preference.

[RandomStyuff]

Personally, I taught the BoeBots kit and I disliked it. It is more of a electronics kit than a mechanical kit...
When I taught it, I felt very locked down. Over the course of 2 weeks (granted, 2 hours a day, 5 days a week) I pretty much stressed out all options I could think of for expansion.

VEX on the other hand, while I haven't taught it I've played around with it. In my opinion it's the perfect educational robotics kit for older kids (NXT is pretty good for younger kids, and also not too bad for highschoolers).

Kids rarely enjoy playing with wires. That's pretty much what Boebots is. The part where most of the kids had most fun was the part where they had to build the robot, and with boebots, that's 15 minutes for anyone who knows his way around a screwdriver!

[Garret]

My dad and I have run lots of LEGO Robotics classes and there are lots of great books out there. However most of those books are for the older LEGO RCX system.

If you know what you are doing you can run a pretty fun and educational robotics class using the book: LEGO Mindstorms NXT The Mayan Adventure by James Floyd Kelly. I must caution anyone who wants to use book because the book is not that well written. I would mainly use it as a template to make robot challenges. We used this book to run a semester long robotics program at one of our schools.

If you were to use the RCX system there are some great books out there. Some of my favorites are Definitive Guide to LEGO Mindstorms 2nd edition By Dave Baum and The Unofficial Guide to LEGO Mindstorms Robots by Jonathan B. Knudsen.

At my school they run engineering courses based on the BoeBot and Mindstorms NXT robot systems.
For the BoeBot Class we used the book that came in the BoeBot kit as our primary textbook and the challenges inside it as the labs. To incorporate some more "schoolish" learning he taught about the concepts of circuitry and programming needed to understand how the BoeBot worked.

The engineering department website for COC is:
http://www.canyons.edu/departments/ENGINEERING/
I do not know how much he has on it right now but I found the two engineering classes I have taken to be a blast. I would recommend you look at the Engineering (ENGR) 101 class. Even though it is not mentioned in the syllabus this class uses the NXT robotics platform for most of the class.