Curriculum Contributions
Activities for All
Interested in being an Author and contributing to Team databot™‘s repository of open source curriculum? Read on to learn about the philosophy of our content plan and how to get involved or simply benefit.
Philosophy
The philosophy of open source, whether it is hardware, software, written materials, music, or other cultural work involves many factors – time, effort, access, required funds, competition, and quality control to name a few. But the underlying premise of the model is that two minds, or maybe two thousand minds, are better than one. And that by working on things together and sharing them we all benefit to a greater degree.
Team databot™ has adopted this philosophy for our curriculum and believes that innovative activities and lessons designed to engage students in STEM topics should be shared freely with the world. That’s why we have adopted the Creative Commons license framework and why we encourage the unfettered sharing, distribution, revision and improvement of this content. We believe that over time, this will result in more diverse, creative, and innovative approaches to engaging students in STEM.
We hope that users will support us by purchasing genuine databot™ products, but many of these activities can easily be adopted to a variety of free or alternative resources including smart phone apps such as Physics Toolbox, Phyphox, and Google Science Journal, or they can be applied to traditional probeware you may own, or even to Arduino data-loggers you build in your garage! We encourage it and support it because we all benefit from innovation, enthusiasm, and engaged students.
Contributions
Contributions to our repository of activities are actively encouraged – we would love to work with you. Contact us and tell us what you are all about and let’s talk!
Bots for Thoughts 2019 - A Mini-Grant Opportunity!
We are incredibly excited to be announcing our first mini-grant opportunity for educators, scientists, hobbyists, data enthusiasts, and everyone else who is engaged in hands-on science. We call it “Bots for Thoughts” and have set it up to be an exchange of our favorite hardware for some of the ingenious ideas we know are floating around out there in the education community!
Here’s the deal:
- Submit your best idea for a databot curriculum module. See the Guidelines and form below.
- We will notify you within ten days if your proposal is accepted.
- If your proposal is accepted, we will ship you a databot Twin Pack – it’s yours to keep in exchange for your commitment to turn your awesome proposal into a new curriculum module for the repository.
- We will support you every step of the way and also contribute time and resources to edit, test, beautify and polish your masterpiece.
- At the end of the experience, we will publish the module and provide you Author acknowledgement and add your contribution to the Creative Commons for everyone around the world to appreciate and use to engage students.
Bots for Thoughts Guidelines for Entry
Greetings educators, data enthusiasts, scientists, and any others that are interested in participating in our Grant Opportunity this summer. The following is a short list of guidelines for authoring materials that will be helpful in your submission. If you have question or are uncertain about any of the application process just contact us – we’ll be happy to help clarify things.
Sample Modules
Read the Module Overview page then look at “Intro to Arduino” and “Can You See the Music” as sample modules to see completed examples.
Selecting Topics for Modules
One of the criteria for databot™ as we were developing it was to be applicable to the core science disciplines, but also include the ability to be used for teaching technical education, coding and computer science, mathematics, and general STEM program topics. Consequently, all areas of exploration are open for application. We are excited to see the diversity that will come from contributors from many different specialties, geographies, and experiences.
Language
We are working hard to standardize the language approach for curriculum modules. This includes consistent use of a fun and friendly tone, 2nd person voice, and a readability score on the Flesch-Kincaid scale of 6th grade.
Software Selection
You can design your activities around any of the software supported by databot presently, or even propose your own if you are an uber geek! Presently we support the Arduino IDE and Google Science Journal software for visualization. However, you can capture data and import it into spreadsheet software or a variety of other visualization tools that you may be familiar with. There are a number of activities that can be done just in the areas of analyzing data using a spreadsheet. Databot can make capturing real data interesting and relevant for analysis which is the foundation for a great lesson. Note, other software support is being developed. We will publish new software support as it becomes available.
Code Challenges
Help! I’ve never coded! If you have never programmed for robotics or code challenges of some type, have no fear, we can help in that area. Although we are including a coding challenge in all modules, we recognize not all teachers are going to be skilled in this area, and many teachers will not use the coding challenges. Please submit your entry and we’ll help you with any of the rough stuff!
Images, Design, Editing, Curating
Great news, we help with all of that! If selected, we will point you to a number of free resources that can be included in the content. Since we are adapting the Creative Commons license framework, this also enables authors to access resources from the commons such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. If selected, we will provide you with simple to follow templates to author your activities, cite references, and include public domain images or illustrations. We’ll fold these into our online module format, edit, beautify, and then release it to the world!