The Rhode Island School of the Future is a Rhode Island non-profit organization dedicated to helping schools improve the "lifelong" learning skills of their students and to supporting teachers in this endeavor. The goal of the Rhode Island Robotics Design Project (RIRDP), an extension of the Rhode Island School of the Future (RISF), is to provide opportunities for students to act like real writers, real scientists, real mathematicians, real designers and to develop technological fluency through involvement in robotic design activities.

This project has piloted robotic design activities for over 20 years in numerous RI classrooms and has adapted concepts from MIT's graduate course in total quality design. Each year a variety of teacher workshops and student challenges are offered statewide.

On January 4, 2003, the RISF facilitated the second annual Rhode Island Robotics FIRST Lego League (FLL) Competition. Thirty-five middle school teams (about 250 students) participated in this robotic design challenge. These challenges were designed to engage and invite all groups of students, especially females, into the world of robotics.

Robotic Park which is held during April, National Science and Technology month, is the culminating event of the year for project classrooms and gives students an opportunity to present their work to a real audience. The Robotics Park event allows 1000 + Rhode Island K-12 grade students to exhibit their collective work in designing and building their behavior based systems. Refer to the Robotics Park Event for more detail.

The reason behind the event is to develop 21st century workplace skills in our students, our 'Workforce after Next.' Teamwork, thinking in terms of systems, applying technology, turning data into knowledge, and managing resources have long been recognized as skills we need to develop in our youth in addition to basic skills. The educational environment provided at Robotics Park is based on technologies and a philosophy of education advanced by the Learning and Epistemology Group at the MIT Media Lab. The RISF is fortunate to be able to collaborate with this group who are developing new tools and technologies to help encourage and support constructionist classroom learning.