Dan Kohn’s Blog

https://makezine.com/2018/09/06/engineering-serious-robo-critters-with-the-opendog-project/?utm_source=MakeNewsletter+20180911&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button&utm_campaign=newsletter

https://robots.ieee.org

Not that this has anything to do with robots, but I thought it was neat that LEGO built a WORKING car out of Lego bricks!

Diverse Education (8/6) runs an article describing the Rice University nonprofit initiative OpenStax, launched in 2012 “to provide free textbooks and digital resources.” The program “is growing and helping to impact the cost of a college education.” Rice “recently announced that more than 2.2 million students and nearly half of U.S. colleges are using the service this year to save about $177 million – helping OpenStax surpass its goal early of saving students $500 million in textbook costs by 2020.” High schools and colleges of all sizes are using the program. “A recent study by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) found that the average textbook costs from around the nation are decreasing for the first time in 50 years. Some say the change is due partly to competition from alternatives such as OpenStax.”

Link to OpenStax

The Memphis (TN) Commercial Appeal (8/4, Lopez) reports Code Crew Code School in Memphis, Tennessee “is training 16 young adults to become entry-level software engineers, earning $60,000 a year, for free.” The paper says that four years of training are condensed into a “six-month coding boot camp.” The school “launched three years ago, teaching after-school programs, summer camps, in-school electives and pop-up classes. The group focused on teaching elementary, middle and high school-aged children computer science.”

https://hechingerreport.org/supply-and-demand-getting-low-income-kids-into-better-jobs-by-getting-them-into-better-schools/

https://www.insideedition.com/girl-scouts-roll-out-30-new-badges-including-cybersecurity-and-robotics-45181

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/darpa-wants-your-insect-scale-robots-for-a-micro-olympics