The RACECAR Crash Course (RCC) is a high school outreach program with the objective of improving diverse representation in STEM through robotics education. So far, two sessions of RCC have run in Spring'18 and Fall'18. These offerings emphasized recruiting low-income and female students respectively.
RCC is intended to serve as an engaging primer and recruiting tool for Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI). Each offering is comprised of six 3-hour sessions and meet on Saturday mornings. Upon completion of RCC, students with no prior experience in programming or robotics are prepared to comfortably complete the BWSI RACECAR Autonomous Grand Prix online prep course, a requirement for admission to BWSI.
Each session of RCC is broken down into a 90min collaborative lecture and a 90min hands-on lab. Since teamwork is crucial to success in modern engineering, labs are often completed in pairs. The most recent offering of RCC had the following topics for each of the six sessions:
- State Machines and Problem Solving
- Python, Primitives, and Types
- Functions and Conditionals
- Recursion and Loops
- Objects and Containers
- Autonomous Driving with Python
Due to the program's continued success, a third, 8-week offering of RCC will run in Spring'19.