As many middle school, high school, and college students and teachers have discovered, robotics is a powerful educational tool for realizing important math and science topics and providing a motivation to learn those concepts in the first place. Several high profile competitions and curricula exist, such as FIRST and FIRST Lego League, Botball, and the Robocamp series of Robotics Curricula developed by some our colleagues here at CMU.

These nationally renowned programs have worked miracles, but we suspect that they represent the tip of the iceberg with regards to robotics curricula. There are untold stories at the local level of competitions, assignments, lesson plans, and curricula that may be useful seeds to others forming their own classes and competitions, or just looking for an exciting new idea to use in an existing class. To that effect, if you’re an educator who has developed a robotics related learning activity of any kind, please, tell us about it!

As a first example, we’re please to announce that the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Club has agreed to provide the curricula, software, and hardware schematics for their class, “Fun with Robots”. The class is provided through the Carnegie Mellon Student College, and has been designed and taught by undergraduate student instructors since 2002. In the course, students complete several assignments, such as building a light-follower, a robot which escapes from a maze, and a free-form robot art project. Although taught to undergraduates, the course requires no previous experience and materials could easily be used with high school students.