About the Course

The lessons in this course are modular. (You can rearrange them so that your club does all the robotics lessons in succession, for example.) Using the suggested calendar of lessons will present your club with enough continuity to make sense of related lessons while experiencing enough variety to maintain interest.

You can use more than one meeting for a lesson, or fit more than one lesson into a meeting. Many lessons include related links you can use to supplement your own knowledge and complement the lesson content.

Each month, your club can take part in an optional activity and post the results on a club blog. You can compare results and progress by viewing the blogs of other clubs.

Over the course of 32 weeks, by following the lesson plans you’ll provide a minimum of 10 hours of instruction per month, for an overall total of 80 hours. But all this learning will take place in a non-classroom environment.

You and your club members can take a relaxed approach that nurtures personal growth and social development as much as course content.

You have some special advantages over the conventional classroom. For one thing, you’re working with young people who are there because they want to be. They’re not under pressure to earn grades. They’re working in a smaller group that might be outside their usual social network.

Each week, you’ll want to take into account the time of day you’re meeting. The kids will have had a full day of school, so it will help to give them time within the meeting to shift gears and to interact. Here’s a sample schedule:

Get Started Arrive, have snack, transition from school to meeting	15 minutes
Focus Share news stories or recount stories related to robotics, GPS, GIS	5 minutes
Activity Experiential—learning by doing	50 minutes
Reflection Discuss what just happened, preview what is coming next	5 minutes
Activity Continuation and completion	50 minutes
Reflection Discuss overall experience, preview next week	5 minutes
Reflection Consider course so far, provide reward	5 minutes

You can incorporate some simple rewards into your meetings, such as ribbons or inexpensive candies. Setting up a point system provides ongoing incentives and at the same time lets you build up to a reward that fits your time constraints and budget (for example, a movie party, a special pen, a candy bar). You might give out certificates once the kids have gone through all of the robotics lessons, all of the GPS lessons, and all of the GIS lessons. In giving out rewards, remember that competition can be exciting and valuable, but fun is essential. Ultimately, learning is most important.

Submitted by admin on October 1, 2009 - 1:32pm