Teaching BattleBots in High School

Some Guy writes: "We all know that everyone's favourite TV show is BattleBots on Comedy Central, Right? Well, a new program has started at my old high school that teaches BattleBots to kids. It's a truly engaging engineering program/curriculum that kids and school systems can use for credit. The program is called BattleBots IQ. Kids out there can get their teachers to go to battlebots training camps during the summer, and then have them teach battlebots to them as a class. I wish it was around when I was a kid."

Comments

FIRST

[NASAKnight]

I am involved in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) program. The main difference between FIRST and battle bots is that battle bots focusses on money and ratings, while FIRST focuses on educating our nations youth. You can go to FIRST's website to find out more--it's a huge program, the stadium for nationls (which is rebuilt each year) is bigger than the Orlando Magic stadium (we even have teams from England, Canada, and Brazil). Also to note, the founder of FIRST (Dean Kamen) is the guy who invented the segway. Basically, I would much rather see more schools enter into FIRST than battle bots, because FIRST focuses on LEARNING and GRACIOUS PROFESIONLISM, while battle bots focusses on MONEY.

RoboCode a great teaching tool for software...

[(H)elix1]

For those trying to teach Java to kids, RoboCode is a great way to get them interested. They may not care about hello world in an applet, but pasting other folks tanks makes event handling fun.