Every once in a while we talk to a teacher who needs to double check that Modular Robotics lesson plans, activities, and curricula are free.  “Wait, you mean I can just download all of this stuff and use it in my classroom for free?”  Indeed.  We make our money selling tiny robots; it never actually occurred to us to charge for the other materials that make up our Education program.  Free material is one thing, now we’re trying to make this stuff more free.

One of our international education resellers recently asked us if they could print out some of our activities and lesson plans, put their logo on the front, and use that as a special bonus to try and sell more Cubelets.  A couple of us thought it was a weird request, a couple of us saw no problem with it.  Discussion ensued.

Modular Robotics’ mission is to make the world a better place with thousands of tiny robots.  Implicit in that is the notion that we want to have a really broad impact, that we want to enable as many kids as possible to use our robots to get a little smarter about the world.  It seems to us like the distribution strategy around all of these materials should be one of openness, encouraging, and remixing, not one of restriction.

We figured that adopting a license would be the best idea for these materials so that the terms are out in the open.  Instead of copyright, I’m proud to announce that all of Modular Robotics’ education materials like lesson plans, teacher training videos, curricula about complexity, engineering units and all future materials will be published with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The CC BY-SA license is the same one used by Wikipedia.  It means that you can use, remix, and modify the modbot education materials, and you can even sell the works that you create.  But anything that you do end up creating that derives from this stuff must also carry this same license, and you have to give credit to Modular Robotics for the initial work.  Remix!