Texts and Software

Texts are available in the Duke textbook store. Students will also be given a number of readings which are printed from various sources.

	The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor's Guide by David J. Perdue (required)
	Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas 2nd Edition by Seymour Papert (optional)
	LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT-G Programming Guide, by James Floyd Kelly (optional)

Staff

Mentoring & Service Learning

As part of the requirements for the course, students are required to attend weekly mentoring session in Durham Public Schools. Durham Public Schools will conduct a criminal record check on volunteers who may have unsupervised contact with children. Successful completion of the course is subject to satisfactory completion of the background check and any other Durham Public Schools requirements.

As part of this course, you will need to travel off campus to Durham School of the Arts. You may choose to drive your own car, be driven by one of your classmates, or walk. You are not required to drive your own car or provide any of other classmates with transportation, but that is permitted.

Travel off campus has inherent risks. Your instructor has attempted to minimize and control these risks through careful design and organization of your service experience. However, a certain level of risk is inevitable, and it is important that you understand this so that you may make an informed decision to take this course.

The service for this course is an integral part of the learning experience for the class. The mentoring experience will serve as a laboratory for the technical, pedagogical, and ethical concepts that are investigated in this course.

Service Learning

Service-learning links classroom learning with service to communities. Service opportunities are developed through collaboration among faculty, students, and individuals and organizations in the community. Service placements are designed to meet two criteria: to enhance the educational goals of a course and to serve the public good by providing a needed service to individuals, organizations, schools, or other entities in the community. Students involved in service-learning make a commitment to engage in a service project or to complete a specified number of hours of service work. Through structured activities of reflection and analysis, they are asked to integrate their service experience with the other materials of the course.

Service-learning goes beyond extracurricular community service because it involves participants in reading, reflection, and analysis. Credit is awarded not for service alone, but for academic work integrating the service experience. At its best, service-learning enhances and deepens students understanding of an academic discipline or subject, while providing them with experience that develops leadership and life skills and engages them in critical reflection about individual, institutional, and social ethics.

Requirements

1. Each student will participate in at least 20 hours of service through afterschool mentoring sessions and weekend workshops.
2. The service experience is integrally related to the academic subject matter of the course. Students will need to learn how to build and program robots, so they can effectively mentor their student teams. Furthermore, students will learn about teaching techniques and discuss the social ramifications of technology in education.
3. Coursework involves critical reflection on the relationship between academic course content and the service experience. Students will complete journals on Blackboard after each mentoring experience and discuss the relationship between course material and their teaching experiences.
4. Coursework involves critical reflection on the ethical and civic dimensions of the service experience. Students will complete a paper on the purported need for afterschool science and technology enrichment programs and how they may or may not contribute to educational and social goals.