Staff is required to be back in less than two weeks (August 4th), with students reporting in the following Monday (August 9th) and I still have no definitive number of robot kits I have to work with and haven’t figured out how to really organize the room for kits and students. Oh yeah, and this is another very short week where I didn’t get on campus until Thursday. I guess it was also unusual enough for me to try to take advantage of these two weeks that admin didn’t want to give me the key to my classroom. They said the door to the room should be unlocked, so no key is necessary. Yeah, unless I need to use the staff restroom, which is locked… I had no problem signing out the key in June, but I guess, this is the beginning of the new school year, so, no key for you until we sign out the keys for everyone. Ugh. 

I still have a lot of robot parts to organize, but I’m close to figuring out how many VEX Cortex Hubs (programable “brains”) I have in stock (I have 60 hubs). Figuring out how to store all of these parts so that they are “easily” accessible to students is the challenge. I’ve been spending a lot of time disassembling the old VEX Cortex testbeds and VEX V5 bots, I’m guessing were used with the 8th grade robotics units in the past. In the coming school year I’m going to be teaching two Intro to Robotics (1/2 year) classes and two Robotics 7/8 (year long) classes. I spoke with the Magnet coordinator today and she said that all Robotics 7/8 students have to have previous robots experience. But if their experience was with any of the past year’s robotics courses (taught by yours truly), then, they didn’t really get a chance to build or program an actual physical robot. I also got the numbers of student I will be having in each class. So, now I get to decide where the line is between the “Intro” course and the year-long course. Also, another teacher will be helping me out and teaching a third “Intro” class, so I have to coordinate and share materials with this person. It’s time to get my head into the full prep zone. T-minus 16 days until students arrive (counting the weekends!).