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SPARK (Starter Programs for the Advancement of Robotic Knowledge)

Educational Resources

Cool Stuff
Programs
Resources for College Professors, Parents and Students
Teaching Resources

Curricular Unit

LEGO Education Website  (expand)

http://www.lego.com/eng/education/mindstorms/default.asp

Robotics is a popular and effective way for teachers to cover important areas of their Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math curricula. The LEGO MINDSTORMS Education series are tailor-made for classroom and after-school activity use. They include construction sets, programming tools, and curriculum relevant activity packs.

Platform: LEGO


Contributed by: Danielle

LEGO Engineering  (expand)

http://www.legoengineering.com/

LEGOEngineering.com is dedicated to providing educators with resources for teaching through engineering with LEGO materials.

Platform: LEGO


Contributed by: Cara

CSci1480: Building Intelligent Robots  (expand)

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs148/

CSci148 is an introduction to fundamental topics in autonomous robot control. This course focuses on the development of ``brains'' for robots. That is, given a machine with sensing, actuation, and computation, how do we develop programs that allow the machine to function autonomously? We answer this question through a series of class discussions and group projects.


Contributed by: Cara

98-012 Fun with Robots  (expand)

http://www.funwithrobots.org/

Fun with Robots is a Student College course taught at Carnegie Mellon University , intended to introduce robotics to those with minimal or no previous knowledge about the subject. The syllabus and other course materials are available on the website.


Contributed by: Cara

16-311 Introduction to Robotics  (expand)

http://www.generalrobotics.org/

This course is offered as the foundation of the Robotics Minor at Carnegie Mellon University.  16-311 presents an overview of robotics in practice and research with topics including vision, motion planning, mobile mechanisms, kinematics, inverse kinematics, and sensors.

In course projects, students construct robots which are driven by a microcontroller, with each project reinforcing the basic principles developed in lectures. Students usually work in teams of three: an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a computer scientist.

This course will also expose students to some of the contemporary happenings in robotics, including current robot lab research, applications, robot contests and robot web surfing.


Contributed by: Cara

Robotics Institute: Undergraduate Minor in Robotics  (expand)

http://www.roboticsminor.org/

The Undergraduate Minor in Robotics is open to students in all colleges of Carnegie Mellon University. Students enrolled in this minor will be exposed to, and hopefully interact with, the robotics research efforts of Carnegie Mellon. This minor provides a focal point for all undergraduates who are interested in robotics at Carnegie Mellon.


Contributed by: Cara

RoboticsCourseWare.org  (expand)

http://roboticscourseware.org/

RoboticsCourseWare.org is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

We created the site for the primary purpose of providing a resource to faculty at colleges and universities to facilitate the implementation of new robotics courses or the improvement of existing courses. We would particularly like to enable institutions without core expertise in robotics to begin to introduce these concepts into their curricula.


Contributed by: Cara

Razor Robotics  (expand)

http://www.razorrobotics.com/

Razor Robotics is dedicated to robot education and offers a wide variety of resources to help everyone, from the newest to the most experienced student roboticists.


Contributed by: bigglesuk1

Educator Training

The STOMP Network  (expand)

http://www.stompnetwork.org/

Welcome to the STOMP Network. This site is designed to be an online resource to unite university-based Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math (STEM) outreach programs across the country and throughout the world. This effort is driven by the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program (STOMP), originating at the Tufts University Center for Engineering Educational Outreach.

It is the intention of this site to build a community of STEM outreach programs similar in nature to the STOMP model. This site serves to provide resources, activities, research, and experiences from STEM outreach programs, that can be shared to help strengthen current programs and disseminate STOMP models.

Platform: LEGO


Contributed by: Cara

Index/Links

NASA Resources for Educators  (expand)

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/index.html

The site includes NASA's Education Materials Finder, to help teachers locate resources that can be used in the classroom. Users may search by keywords, grade level, product type and subject. With hundreds of publications and Web sites indexed, the finder is the best way to locate NASA educational resources.


Contributed by: Danielle

Engineering Pathway  (expand)

http://www.engineeringpathway.com/ep/index.jhtml

Engineering Pathway provides a digital library of engineering teaching resources to the K-12 Education and Higher Education communities. Engineering Pathway also provides education-level specific information about preparing courses, developing engineering curricula, and national standards and accreditation programs.


Contributed by: Danielle

National Center for Women & Information Technology Digital Library  (expand)

http://www.ncwit.org/resources.library.html

NCWIT is the National Center for Women & Information Technology. They are a coalition of more than 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits working to increase women's participation in information technology (IT). NCWIT has partnered with the University of California at Berkeley and the Engineering Pathway to build a comprehensive and diverse digital library of rich media, articles, research papers, curricula, and partner organizations on the topics of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computing and gender.


Contributed by: Danielle

Interactive

NASA Education Robotics Website  (expand)

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/robotics/home/index.html

Innovation, creativity, problem solving -- the world of robotics at NASA is all of these things. Spend some time on this site to see if robotics might be in your future.


Contributed by: Cara

Outreach Program

Institute for Computing Education  (expand)

http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt

ICE is the Institute for Computing Education. ICE is a partnership between the Georgia Department of Education and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. This partnership was announced in June 2004 by Kathy Cox, Georgia's State Superintendent of Schools, and Dean Richard DeMillo of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. ICE has provided links for teachers to materials and information relating to computer science, robotics, programming, and other related topics at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/163.


Contributed by: Danielle

Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach  (expand)

http://www.ceeo.tufts.edu/

The Tufts University Center for Engineering Education & Outreach (CEEO) is a leader in supporting efforts to integrate engineering into K-12 education. The CEEO consists of four divisions or pillars working closely to ultimately achieve the mission: Outreach, Educational technology development, Research, and Student workshops and teacher professional development.


Contributed by: Cara

Tufts STOMP  (expand)

http://www.stompnetwork.org/

The Tufts University STOMP program was the first of many STOMP sites in existence today. As the flagship, Tufts STOMP has offered programs to both its main campus in Medford/Somerville, MA and its Boston Campus for over 10 years. The program at Tufts has always been a paid $10/hr job for both undergraduate and graduate students to participate in up to 8-10 hrs/week. Each semester the program averages about 35 fellows of all ages from a variety of disciplines ranging from engineering to child development.

The main goal for Tufts is to partner pairs of fellows with K-12 teachers in the greater Boston area to create an engineering curriculum that reaches across all disciplines, peaks the students' interests in engineering, and improves the students' problem-solving skills. The engineering curriculum also specifically meets the standards required by the Science, Technology, and Engineering component of the Massachusetts Frameworks.

Platform: LEGO


Contributed by: Cara

Software Tool / Environment

Pyro  (expand)

http://pyrorobotics.org/?page=Using_20the_20Roomba

Pyro stands for Python Robotics. The goal of the project is to provide a programming environment for easily exploring advanced topics in artificial intelligence and robotics without having to worry about the low-level details of the underlying hardware. Supported robots include the iRobot Create (see http://pyrorobotics.org/?page=Using_20the_20Roomba).

Platforms: Various, including the iRobot Create


Contributed by: Danielle

Microsoft Robotics Studio  (expand)

http://www.microsoft.com/robotics/

The Microsoft(r) Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 (Microsoft RDS) is a Windows(r)-based environment for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware.

Microsoft RDS includes a lightweight asynchronous services-oriented runtime, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools, as well as templates, tutorials, and sample code to help you get started.

Platform: LEGO, iRobot Create


Contributed by: Danielle

Tekkotsu  (expand)

http://tekkotsu.org/

Tekkotsu means "iron bones" in Japanese, often used in the context of buildings' structural framework. Similarly, this software package aims to give you a structure on which to build, handling routine tasks so that you can focus on higher level programming.

Tekkotsu is an application development framework for intelligent robots, it uses an object-oriented and event-passing architecture, making full use of the template and inheritance features of C++. It was originally written for the Sony AIBO, but has since grown to run on a variety of different robots.

Platform: Various, including iRobot Create


Contributed by: Danielle

Matlab Toolbox for the iRobot Create (MTiC)  (expand)

http://www.usna.edu/Users/weapsys/esposito/roomba.matlab/

The iRobot Create is a reprogrammable version of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner for robotics hobbyists, educators and researchers. Out of the package, users can use their PC to control the robot by sending numerical sentences over a serial connection.

Two obstacles, especially for educational purposes, are: (1) the cryptic nature of the command interface; and (2) the difficulty in establishing a software serial port connection to the robot. This Matlab toolbox seeks to overcome these difficulties.

Platform: iRobot Create


Contributed by: Cara

brown-ros-pkg  (expand)

http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/

brown-ros-pkg is a repository with instructions and code for using the Create with Willow Garage's ROS middleware. brown-ros-pkg is maintained and developed by the Brown Robotics lab headed by Dr. Chad Jenkins.


Contributed by: Cara