Educator's Guide Overview

The FRCDesign.org Learning Course is a self-paced, comprehensive program that teaches FRC robot design and CAD skills. This guide is intended to help educators effectively implement the course while supporting their students throughout the learning process. Designed for accessibility, the course requires minimal prior knowledge of physics or math, making it suitable for students from various backgrounds. The emphasis is on building knowledge through consistent practice and review.

Course Usage

The course is built for self-paced learning, where students can progress at their own speed. It can either be used by motivated students to self-teach or in a more classroom-esque setting where it's led by student design leads or mentors.

Why Self-Paced?

Different people will have different starting points and different things they don't understand or struggle with. Going at a set pace may cause some students to be bored and others to struggle and fall behind.

The ideal setup is for educators to offload most of the curriculum (concepts, exercises, projects) to the website, freeing them up to give more individualized help and review to each student. This is what may be called a "self-paced blended learning" approach, where preferably meeting time or class time is given for students to do the work at their own pace and for educators to review and catch mistakes as students are working through exercises and projects.

This approach helps increase motivation and engagement, reduces gaps in knowledge, builds confidence, and helps make sure every student gets the support they need to learn.

Course Content

The content itself is focused on teaching CAD through FRC-relevant exercises, where new skills and concepts are introduced in each exercise or project. Each section has a bit of explanation on the concepts or skills being introduced in the exercises, with the exercises gradually decreasing in guidance to help students get more confident with using the software.

The progression of the course moves from learning how to use the software (while using and teaching FRC-relevant skills and engineering such as COTS parts and power transmissions) to designing whole individual mechanisms, teaching mechanism design along the way. Students will then learn how to integrate these mechanisms into full robot designs. More detailed information on each topic will be given in the Design Handbook for students or educators to use for extra information, but that's out of the scope of the course.

Students will be able to focus on what they need to improve on through a mix of self-review and external review (from educators and/or other students).

Extra Practice

Students may choose to do their own custom mechanisms or projects to practice specific skills or learn how to design a specific mechanism; this should be encouraged and supported. External review and resources are more important for these because they don't have a specific reference for knowledge inside of the course.

The purpose of robot design (and the specific design style the course uses) is to allow the team to effectively manufacture, build, program and drive the robot. The design style focuses on utilizing 2-D plates and patterned box tube. This is, as far as we know, the lowest resource design style with the highest ceiling, as you can get plates cut using a service such as Fabworks and cut the tubes and shafts using just a hacksaw. It makes it as easy as possible to have a tight schedule and prioritize making the robot work well and drive well. There are also countless example robots and resources using this design style to take inspiration from.