This week I'm working at the
Scientists in Residence program teaching middle school teachers how to teach robotics - kind of a different twist. For 3 days, we had the teachers build robots and then learn how to program their robots to make basic moves - forward, back, turn, and follow a line. On the fourth day, we brought in students for them to practice with. The teachers were fairly petrified. Many of them kept asking me for the "solutions manual," and telling them to "be creative" and "use their imaginations" just wasn't going down well. But by the end of the first 3 hours, the kids had pretty much mastered everything the teachers had learned in their 3 days of training. So the teachers fell back into a "mentoring" position and let the kids take over. Even I learned a few new things from those kids.
