Materials for a robotics class of 30

[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.