I promised many of you and myself that I would find a way to make education standards and school curriculum materials accessible to the community all in one place before kickoff. I just uploaded updated files and here is everything related that I’ve been involved with over the past three years:
The national effort to tie robotics competitions to curriculum. Videos and basic information from the 2006 Robotics Education Symposium are now available and documentation that includes national standards, skills, assessment, along with rubric evaluation criteria and web resources will be available VERY soon, so keep checking this link: http://www.tsarobotics.org/
Georgia is in the process of adopting new performance standards in all areas. I have annotated the new Physical Science (middle school) standards to show how robotics concepts can be used to teach the standards. The goal here is to make the course interesting to students who will be building robots as part of their class activities in physical science.
This same process can be done with standards in a number of states. If we can get more science teachers involved in robotics and show how robotics can support the curriculum, we will be making progress.
Excellent timing! I participated in a local robotics program in high school and the teachers are desperately trying to prove to the district and Washington state that the curriculum is valuable. I was tasked to find if there was some, if any, existing precedent to help out, and I thought there had to be something within the FIRST community.
I was just about to go searching when I found this thread. Thanks for your contributions!
I promised an update and here it is. The “Standards Based Robotics Competition Curriculum Development Framework” was presented late last week at the ITEA conference in San Antonio and is now available for download at the robotics education symposium website here: http://www.tsarobotics.org/
The document is designed to help the student, teacher, administrator, and robotics “coach” at the HS level. It can even be used to describe/justify/explain the need for and benefit of robotics education to local, state, and national educational/government leaders.
