Trying to develop holistic curriculum. Need assistance.

Technical Robotics Education and Curriculum
1

Hello, CDenizens…

I’m looking for help in developing an holistic curriculum for my robotics team at my high school.

This is the team’s (and my) third year of FIRST, and I’ve decided that I’m going to teach robotics like a class, as that offers the most appropriate structure for my students.

The difficulty for me is that my students lack the aptitude to know what they’re doing, from the beginning. The geniuses behind the Lazy Mentor system described my situation perfectly: “Basically, our student team consists of young students who love videogames and the idea of robots, but who have little practical training in the construction of robots.”

So, I’ve snaked the entirety of their system, and have put it to use with some good effect, but I’m looking for… more.

I have students who arrive with other skills, like video, or photography, or web design; how do I utilize those skills, in addition to teaching them robotics?

How do I teach my students how to fundraise (since, even if this was a class, the school wouldn’t fund lodging, van rental, and trips to meets, but would use the sports booster program)? How do I teach them how to write grants, if I never have? I’ve been told by one of my mentors, repeatedly, that “the money is there”, I just need to go find it.

How do I teach my students about electricity, when I don’t have a lot of intrinsic knowledge of it? I know there are tons of cool projects to be done here.

How do I teach my students about programming, when I have little knowledge of it?

And, perhaps the most important, how do I help to get female students involved at all levels? I want to bring in young women and have them be more than window-dressing for diversity. How did co-ed teams recruit their first female students, and how do you make robotics a place that is welcomingly co-ed?

I’m happy for websites, books, files, anything that anyone can provide.

2

This next sentence is half serious, half tongue in cheek: To certain extent, ignore the current students.

Now, obviously I’m not truly suggesting ignoring your current team members. Communicate (2-way, not 1-way) with them, and help them go as far as you can inspire them to go.

However, you are one person, thinking about what to include in one class, and you are describing goals and skills that more often than not involve a few years to attain/develop

Engage colleagues and the community. Start inspiring when the students are in elementary school (VexIQ, FLL). Continue as they pass through middle school (VRC, FTC). In high school, put capstones (VRC, FTC, FRC) on the several pillars of accomplishments that will have been built.

Every skill you mentioned in your question can and should be developed by some part of a school. Are you sure that all of them are developed in a robotics class? Maybe some of them are taught elsewhere, and are used by a team that remembers that “the robot is only the campfire we gather around.”, and that draws on the talents of the entire student body?

Blake

3

The CD-Media whitepapers section here on Chief Delphi is a good place to start.

4

It sounds like you’re unsure of several things and especially of your own abilities. I want to tell you, and want to make sure you hear, that being a mentor is about being able to guide students than being a pure knowledge transfer. Coming here to ask means you are interested in successful students, all you need to do is spend time learning with them, and setting them on the right path.

I saw a really great presentation a few weekends ago by FIRST 135, Penn Robotics. They’ve implemented FRC in the classroom in a really unique way. Contacting them may give you ideas - http://robotics.phmschools.org/contactus/

I have students who arrive with other skills, like video, or photography, or web design; how do I utilize those skills, in addition to teaching them robotics?

If you approach it as teaching them to run a FRC program, you can absolutely utilize these skills.

Video/Photography - Students can be tasked to create an end of the year montage or to figure out how to profile the team best with these mediums. I’m even going so far as to encourage my team to create a short film about our past two year’s robots.
Web Design - Build a team website. Build other apps, how about an attendance app, or a finances app.

How do I teach my students how to fundraise (since, even if this was a class, the school wouldn’t fund lodging, van rental, and trips to meets, but would use the sports booster program)?

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/first-fundraising-toolkit is amazing. Look through there and you can literally implement most of those documents that are written. Don’t worry right now if it’s good or bad, but spend the time yourself to read through those documents, get an idea of what other teams fundraising structure looks like, and work with students to emulate it.

Fundraising is hard because it’s a higher rate of failure than most things. I tell my students for every 10 companies they contact 2 or 3 may get back to you, and 1 MAY donate.

Be the hope for them and keep pushing them.

How do I teach them how to write grants, if I never have?

This is also hard, but if you look at the fundraising toolkit and develop several of those documents. Grants should come much easier, it’ll be a lot more copy paste.

From my limited experience with grants, you really have to determine what the grantor wants (this is true for other donors as well). Figure out what aspect of FRC is most appealing to them and highlight it.

How do I teach my students about electricity, when I don’t have a lot of intrinsic knowledge of it?

I think you answered yourself:

I know there are tons of cool projects to be done here.

The point of FIRST is to take learning to hands-on. Do a cool project.

How do I teach my students about programming, when I have little knowledge of it?

Simply. Learn it. Download LabVIEW, and play with it.

And, perhaps the most important, how do I help to get female students involved at all levels?

This is a personal goal of mine as well, and by far the hardest. My current solution is that I ensure that all of the students on my team do different activities from STEM activities to fundraising to volunteering. It’s easier for me to deal with 10 students, but I basically in my head have a plan for every single one. I know which student (in this case female) struggles with math because of her confidence, and so I ask her to build a workshop table.

It may be harder, but there are some students, males and females, that love robotics and will be willing to do anything. Others whom you have to pave a path for to do anything. And while I naturally notice a tendency for females to shy away from the STEM aspect of the team, there are males that do this too.

How did co-ed teams recruit their first female students, and how do you make robotics a place that is welcomingly co-ed?

My solution was to encourage student recruitment, but even the females on the team prefer not to recruit other females. I’m currently at a lose for a solution. I’m still trying to encourage students to recruit others and have been dropping subtle hints about what some of their classmates are up to. We have an open door recruitment policy, so anyone is welcome to join at anytime. I’ve seen some students hang out in our room, and my hope is that I can get some of them interested.

I wish I could give you books, but I do a lot of experimenting on my own accord. Combining with stuff I read about teaching (I’m not a teacher), and learning about what other teams do. Hope this helps.

5

Not sure how prevalent it is out in California but project lead the way PLTW a high school STEM program. Has a great curriculum based on Vex Robotics FTC kits

6

This is difficult, and in some places impossible: find a shop teacher. I mean it.

It’s one thing to do CAD till zero dark thirty visualizing some marvelous machine, and quite another to build the thing to the vision. And critique and tweak the engineering drawings into something you can actually build…

Shop teachers have the skills in their hands and head that will get you started, or at lest tell you what you don’t know and then what you need, and the sources to acquire it.

It’s beyond unfortunate that we have in many places thrown out vocational education and its curators, thinking we will send all kids to the university.

PS- having access to a shop classroom with all the weird gear and such would be nice too…

7

Jesse, our team’s head coach, is teaching a robotics course this year. It’s independent of the team, but there are a number of students who are in both, including my youngest son, Perry (far left in my WAI). While Jesse does know most if not all of the material, he specifically decided to make this a “teach yourself” course. There are several internet-capable computers in the class, and using a cell phone as a web browser to learn about robotics and related topics is fair game. Students helping each other is encouraged. Everything you need to know to do the coursework is on the internet - somewhere. Deadlines are real, but negotiable. This is totally out of phase with late 20th and early 21st century “lead you by the hand” teaching, but far more in phase with the real world. And yes, a significant fraction of the class is failing.
Back in the real world, I’ve been serving on a number of “vacancy panels” at my office. These panels provide advisory information to the selecting official (the person who decides whom to hire). The thing that I have forcibly re-learned here is that while specific, detailed knowledge and training lets people come up to speed faster, general knowledge of how to find out and and how to lead are better in the long run, especially for positions where people are expected to lead or be innovative. These are the points that we should be teaching in schools, and that many FIRST programs (those that I would consider “better”, independently of how well they compete) provide. I certainly know that at the upper levels, I’d rather hire someone who can pass Jesse’s course with a B or C than someone who can pass a “spoon-fed” physics course with an A or B; we hire scientists and engineers to creatively push the envelope, not to regurgitate old knowledge.

8

I’m actually the shop teacher for my school. I’m in the process of building my industrial arts program from scratch (acquiring machinery, developing curriculum), and I have 20 years’ experience in woodworking, and 5 years’ experience in metalworking. I am a new arrival to the world of FIRST and computers, however, and am not an engineer, nor am I especially CAD-minded.

I’m currently working through my credential, which will allow me to legitimately teach, but I know that a significant component of teaching robotics as a class is having a curriculum. I can’t conceptualize of a way that I could teach FIRST as a 9-month class, and so I’m looking for how I could break it down into its various constituent parts (electrical, mechanical, programming, etc.) and teach those, with culminating benchmark projects that can be used to loop students back into the culminating project (building a competitive robot).

I’m wondering if anyone who is a teacher can help me with curricular suggestions, anyone who is an industry mentor can suggest activities that can be used to make more transparent the various subsets (e.g. basic wiring and electricity, for example, as I’ve never taken physics), and anyone who is a student who can point out to me what their teachers do or did that made robotics a valuable and rewarding experience.

9

In addition to the links and namedropping included in the previous replies, I always refer curriculum questioners to Rich Kressly.

A quick search here in CD will turn up plenty of curriculum topics with (and some without) his posts in them. He has broad experience inside and outside of FIRST, and inside and outside of teaching; and I believe he has a good reputation within the CD community.

Good luck.
Blake

10

Here’s the good news …
There are a LOT more robotics curriculum resources available today than when I started my robo journey with FRC103 back in 2000ish.

Here’s a quick snapshot of robotics curriculum projects I’ve led over the years, with links where appropriate. While some of these could likely use updating, they are all relevant:

  1. Wrote this after being part of FRC 103 for 4 years, when I was a FIRST SM. Education Standards Matching for PA/DE mapped to FIRST Programs (as they existed at the time I produced the document): http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1898

  2. Soon after founding FRC1712, I did the heavy lifting on writing the Innovation & Invention Robotics course at Lower Merion: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1897
    This course is still being taught - with some updates and there are plenty of sound ideas here.

  3. Then there was an NSF-funded Technology Student Association (the other TSA) Robotics Framework project I did a ton of work on with a small team of framers: http://www.roboticsengineeringcte502.com/uploads/1/1/5/5/11558216/tsa_robotics_framework.pdf

  1. The FREE VEX EDR Curriculum (for MS/HS) is VERY comprehensive, includes a CAD component with Autodesk Inventor, and has a competition robotics slant/focus, as well as providing pre-post tests, a syllabus, standards matching and more teacher resources too. As part of VERY talented team, I was one of the “heavy lifters” on the initial iteration of this curriculum and have been involved, in some way, with every iteration since. Today, it’s part of my job to maintain and update this resource: http://curriculum.vexrobotics.com/

  2. The FREE VEX IQ Curriculum (For ES/MS, but has a ton of K-12 implications) is probably my favorite of all of them. Think EDR Curriculum for younger classrooms and/or a standalone walkthrough curriculum for an older kid to learn from. Teacher resources, specific learning activities, rubrics, “idea book pages” that lead younger/newer students through the documentation process which becomes the Engineering Notebook, open-ended challenges, embedded videos, downloads, etc: http://vexiq.com/curriculum

If you want to spend just a few bucks you can get the hard copy books that match the online content, too: http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/products/view-all/iq-education-guide-g.html

  1. In addition to those five major projects, I’e done other work with specific school districts to help meet their individual/local needs as well and have other resources from those projects that I’d be happy to share.

  2. As others have suggested, please search the rest of CD - I’ve used other people’s stuff all the time, I’m just limiting my post to things I’ve been directly involved in.

In the end you need to decide what you want to accomplish with your robotics curriculum - one size does not necessarily fit all and you need to ask all the pertinent questions, which include BUT are not limited to: Do you want a K-12 progression in your schools? Just high school? Just your FRC students? Focus on Mechanical? Programming? Both? How much time do you have to teach? What’s your budget for equipment and supplies?

  • Personally, I believe, when you’re talking curriculum on any level - initial EASE of USE and cost become the driving factors when you implement robotics curriculum. If you don’t go down those roads, then you’ll never reach as many students as you hope to, nor will you easily be able to engage others to help teach (whether it’s a part of the school day or not).

  • If I were going to start a brand new FRC team today, with no other local robotics education taking place, I’d consider grabbing a handful of VEX IQ Super Kits and maybe a set of the curriculum books (or just use the FREE online version). Even though this is geared toward younger ages, it has PLENTY of content for HS students, especially “new to robotics” students. Walk them through the pertinent units according to what you find important and how much time you have. Just for one example, The Key Concepts (http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/education/iq-curriculum/key-concepts) and Mechanisms (http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/education/iq-curriculum/mechanisms) Units are LOADED with stuff your FRC kids will need to know well. You can also mix and match the IQ and EDR Curriculum units (http://curriculum.vexrobotics.com/curriculum) with IQ kits (to a certain extent) if you’d like more detailed, higher end learning beyond the “basics”.

The FRC problem is supposed to be REALLY REALLY hard, but when it comes to inspiring through education you need as accessible and affordable an entry point as possible.

If you have any additional questions or you want to talk in more detail, I can be reached at kres@vex.com