Gadgeteer Robotics for 8th Graders

Well, there’s something to that, too. I’ve been doing C# long enough now that I’d probably have to look up some of the VB syntax again.

“Book”? What’s that? Don’t you have a search engine on your computer to find stuff on StackOverflow? :wink:

What’s this search engine you speak of? I use this forum for everything, if I can’t find it here then I go get a book.

Working with 13-14 years olds!! Mmm, you might finally find someone to teach you how to rotate those pictures.

:stuck_out_tongue:

Good luck with the project too.

UPDATE: I got a call from the school admin last night excitedly saying that they had such an overwhelming response from the students, to the point that the students had been spreading the word in the hallways to each other that they had enough kids sign up for 10+ teams and they expect more to sign up today. And they are going to go ahead and start the process with the school board to add this to the curriculum for next year! ;D

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@ Dave McLaughlin - either that or we will have a whole class room of kids now posting pictures “gary style”! 8)

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@ Gary - That is exciting to hear!

One of the guys on my team is trying to get a junior Lego league kicked off at one of the local schools and I have been pushing the benefits of going with a .NETMF based syllabus for older kids. It would be great to have a reference and, if you are willing/able to share, a syllabus outline once you get this kicked off.

Good luck!

@ taylorza - Absolutely, right now it’s going to be a lot “let’s try this to see if the kids respond”. But I can tell you from the administrators point of few, having no hardware experience they loved the fact that you could simply “plug-n-play” several different examples from the same kit. They felt the flexibility would be invaluable in a class room setting.

@ Gary - Time to bring back the Cerbot :wink:

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@ ianlee74 - I used that for the demonstration. I started with all of the same components, cerberus, sensors, etc on a holy board and then showed them the final product being the
Cerbot.

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Yea, I think the Cerbot would a more interesting platform for students.

UPDATE: I spoke to the school tonight and they narrowed down the kids to one team of 5, we start the program next week, wish me luck.

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Good luck! ;D

We’ve talked about it before but the surprising thing is that the team will be made up of mostly girls.

Considering my daughter, I don’t find that surprising at all.

@ ianlee74 - I made the wrong assumption in that it would be mostly boys at that age interested in learning programming and building something.

We can refer to that as the “Commodore 64 Effect”.

A couple of years ago I got roped into teaching a introduction to computer programming class at my kid’s high school. It was just after I discovered C# and .Net Micro but I wasn’t convinced that was the right language to teach in an intro class. After a fair amount of research, I stuck with C# and .Net for 2 main reasons, 1) VS Express is free and a world class IDE and 2) Microsoft and others provide an incredible amount of high quality teaching material free on the web.

If you’re interested, here is the list of references I gave the kids to start. I skipped anything that talked about developing a console app since I’m pretty sure that would bore the kids (and most adults) to death.

Microsoft Visual C# Developer Home
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh388566.aspx

C# Tutorials

http://www.csharp-station.com/Tutorial.aspx

Books

Google, youTube and a million other web sites

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Today is our first day with the kids, I will keep you all posted tonight. If I don’t post anything then that will tell you as well how the day went!

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@ Gary - Good luck. Hope you survive!

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@ devhammer - me to, my only fear is that they are actually smarter than me and my whole career has been a lie…lol