Need Help for Advanced Robotics class

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klichtenwald
 
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Joined: Fri Apr 12, 2013 8:19 am

Need Help for Advanced Robotics class

Post by klichtenwald »

I am running an Advanced Robotics class next year at Gloucester High School, Gloucester Mass.
We have had a Vex based robotics class for 5 years now and I want to push my best students to the next level.
We have been using IOIO mint this year to control our boats for sailbot.org
I have 25 students for this class and 3900.00 dollars to spend. Any ideas?
I need to get the most for what I have. Prices and kits are all over the place, I need a little guidance here.
Thanks
Kurt Lichtenwald
Robotics and Physics Teacher
Gloucester High School
[email protected]
Last edited by adafruit_support_rick on Sat May 04, 2013 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Moved topic to our "For Educators" forum

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skr0d
 
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Re: Need Help for Advanced Robotics class

Post by skr0d »

We have VEX at our Middle schools, and I am getting involves with them as a parent volunteer. From what I have seen, they use standard servos and sensors. If you swapped out the VEX controller for a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, you could probably use the same hardware but introduce your students to new programming languages used by Raspberry Pi and Arduino. You might have to make some adapters for the servers and the sensors, but you could probably do it.

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saasrobotics
 
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Re: Need Help for Advanced Robotics class

Post by saasrobotics »

Hello! I am in the exact same boat next year. We started a robotics class last year and used Parallax's Scribbler Robot and the Calico Python curriculum. It worked great! BUT, it was not very hands on. It was very centered on the Python programming.
Next year we'll have Robotics 1 and an "advanced" course. I was thinking of using the Arduino Shield Bot from Parallax for the first class, then the 2nd class using Arduino based sensors and have the students construct a few different projects........I had though of doing an arduino art project...like fancy LED's or....glowing bag or something of the sort. Then for the second part of the course actually construct from scratch some sort of functional robot. I think I could do this all on a fairly small budget. Those Lego kits are super expensive!

How far have you come in planning?

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