The University of Massachusetts at Lowell is holding its Botfest exhibition on
Saturday, March 24. For more information: http://www.cs.uml.edu/botfest/
Dr. Franklyn Turbak, a computer science professor at Wellesley College in
Wellesley, MA let me know about an event at Wellesley College:
The Wellesley CS Dept is holding its Cirque du CS activity on Saturday, March 31
(http://cs.wellesley.edu/cirque/). Several of the robots from this past January
will be on display there, as well as creative projects
from many of our other courses.
Educators, here are some other links of interest offered by Professor Turbak.
From what I can see, they are not currently using NXT, but I'm sure it would work
even better with NXT. (They've been teaching this course at a liberal arts college
for ten years!)
The course: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~rds/
In particular, look at the following;
(1) Their syllabus from this past January:
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~rds/handouts/CourseInformation07.pdf
(2) The museum of past projects:
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~rds/museum.html
(3) Their journal paper about the course:
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~rds/handouts/RDS-JSET-final.pdf
Prof. Turbak also suggests:
"You should also check out PicoCrickets (http://www.picocricket.com),
a robotics system that my colleague Robbie Berg helped to develop.
It is targeted at both girls and boys and encourages projects that tend
to be more artistic/creative than traditional robotics systems".
Comments
Do you plan to attend any of these? If so, I'll look forward to your summary and hopefully pictures too!
The link you posted to the Wellesley course syllabus is going to be very helpful for me. I am pitching a 3 credit hour Introduction to LEGO Robotics special topics course to my dean later this week for the community college where I teach. Here are a some articles regarding LEGO Robotics courses that are being offered at Cerro Coso Community College in California (not my college, just one of my inspirations):
1) http://cerrocoso.edu/pio/news/2006/2006-11-29_RoboticsKRV.htm
2) http://codecrunchers.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/lego-robotics-—-learning-through-hard-fun-and-purposeful-play/
3) http://codecrunchers.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/robotics-class-at-cerro-coso-solves-problems-with-legos/
4) http://www.collegeteacher.org/robotics/news.php
All of this raises a question for me. How many other educators are reading this blog? What level do you teach at?