Teacher readiness checklist

The most common reason a teacher hesitates to run robotics is a belief that they need to know more than they do. The bar is real but it is lower and more specific than most people assume.

What you genuinely need

• Assemble and disassemble the kit your learners use, unaided, at normal speed.
• Wire a motor and a sensor correctly without a diagram.
• Load a program onto the controller and know what to do when that fails.
• Read a program a learner wrote and predict what it will do.
• Recognise the four common failures: flat battery, loose connector, wrong sensor port, unsaved change.
• Run the safety rules for your room without looking them up.

What you do not need

• To be able to write the program yourself faster than a learner can.
• Formal electronics or circuit theory.
• To know the answer before the learner asks. "Let's find out" is a legitimate and useful response.
• Experience competing.

Before your first solo session

1. 01Build the session's project yourself, start to finish, in advance.
2. 02Note where you got stuck. Your learners will get stuck there too.
3. 03Check every kit is complete before the room fills.
4. 04Decide what a learner who finishes early will do next.
5. 05Know where the spares are and what you are allowed to open.

Building independence over a term

Co-teaching works better than observation. A teacher who runs half of each session from week one is independent far sooner than one who watches for a term and then takes over, and the handover never becomes an event to dread.