K-8 Curriculum

In the Teacher Digital Portal, at truerobotics.org/curriculum-access. The portal has two main resources: the Curriculum Portal, which holds all the teaching resources, and the Learning Portal, which holds all the training resources. When teachers open a program, they see every grade level they have access to, the General curriculum, and for Pilot and Axle a FlexForge add-on folder. Treads has four grade folders: Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade and 3rd Grade. Each program also has a full curriculum map, as a PDF and a Word document, for a quick look at the topics across the unit.

Most of the teachers we work with say prep takes about five minutes once they understand the flow, and that is mostly a matter of how fast the PowerPoint loads on their computer. The lesson plan, presentation, entrance ticket, reflection and answer keys are ready in the Curriculum Portal, so there is nothing to write. Our Director of Education is a former teacher, and her goal is always to get prep time down to zero.

So teachers can choose. If you like the PDF as it is, print or download it and teach from it. When you need specific modifications or accommodations for different groups of students, the editable Word version makes that easy. Every lesson plan, entrance ticket, reflection, answer key and curriculum map comes in both formats. The PowerPoint presentation and the lesson videos are the only files that come in one format.

The lessons are built for exactly that. The presentations show students precisely what to do the first time they do anything, so hesitant or intimidated teachers can learn right alongside their students through the videos and the speaker notes. Teachers also get the self-paced Learning Portal, a 30-minute personalized intro session, one to two hour one-on-one training sessions and an assigned point of contact. We always recommend that teachers build the robot themselves, following the portal's build videos, before putting it in front of students.