Ladies and gentlemen,
I’m trying to put together an off-season training regimen for students who want to get involved in programming the robot, and I’m stumped at figuring out where to start. The school I’m helping with has funding to set up equipment for students to a degree, but student involvement is very low due to high poverty rates in the area and the problems that come along with that.
As such, I’m trying to put together a curriculum that I can teach in short segments after school lets out during the months leading up to kickoff. I want to start with basic programming concepts (data types, loops, control structures, playing with WPIlib, etc.) and move into more FIRST-oriented high-level topics (drive motors, troubleshooting cameras, vision processing, PID controls, pneumatics, etc.) as a possible follow-up class.
I’m looking for two things:
- Any sort of advice with course pacing and planning? I’ve never taught anything to a classroom setting before, and I don’t know the first thing about planning a long-term curriculum.
- Any links to cheap resources I could use for facilitating the class (ie. discount motors, etc.) We already have rooms full of computers, and boxes of myRIOs that can be configured for teaching basic LabVIEW stuff.
I want to do a suite of mini-projects that students can pursue at their own pace, such as the following (ideas or gripes welcomed):
- Light stack
- Joystick input
- Servos and limit switches
- Drive motors
- Mecanum Drive
- Pneumatics
- Color sensors
- Motors with Encoders
- Conveyor belt
- Pulley lift
- Pick & Place Robot
- Line-follow robot
- Camera
- Vision target following
If anyone has gone through building out a program like this before, or knows of one in the wild, could you let me know?