Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to twenty eight students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and course curriculum were the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost robot for secondary level education and home use. Cooperation between Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, Gogoco, LLC. and Acroname Inc. yielded notable innovations including a fast-build robot construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java-based robot programming interface. In conjunction with robot and curriculum design, the authors at the Robotics Institute and the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy, implementing both formative and summative evaluations of progress as well as an in-depth, one week ethnography to identify micro-genetic mechanisms of learning that would inform the broader evaluation. This article describes the robot and curriculum design processes and then the educational analysis methodology and statistically significant results, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics.

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The Robotic Autonomy Mobile Robotics Course: Robot Design, Curriculum Design and Educational Assessment

This paper introduces an educational robotics course offered as one of the Interdisciplinary Studies Courses under General Education category at a liberal art college that serves predominately underprivileged population of students from neighboring communities in New Jersey. It also presents the case study to examine participated students’ learning from the course. The results show that, although the focus of the course is the educational robotics and programming to control robots created with LEGO Mindstorms, the students identified their learning of collaboration and cooperation skills as well as communication skills as one of the best learning outcomes

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Educational robotics for promoting 21st century skills

The purpose of the course presented here is to introduce freshmen to embedded systems using LEGO Mindstorms, under an ANSI-C programming environment. The students build their own LEGO robots, make programs for them using ANSI-C, and operate them. By creating these LEGO robots, the students become more motivated, learning the basic concepts of embedded systems and how these concepts can be applied to real world problems.

Introduction for Freshmen to Embedded Systems Using LEGO Mindstorms

We describe the pedagogy behind the MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute Robotics Program, a new high-school STEM program in robotics. The program utilizes state-of-the-art sensors and embedded computers for mobile robotics. These components are carried on an exciting 1/10-scale race-car platform. The program has three salient, distinguishing features: (i) it focuses on robotics software systems: the students design and build robotics software towards real-world applications, without being distracted by hardware issues; (ii) it champions project-based learning: the students learn through weekly project assignments and a final course challenge; (iii) the learning is implemented in a collaborative fashion: the students learn the basics of collaboration and technical communication in lectures, and they work in teams to design and implement their software systems. The program was offered as a four-week residential program at MIT in the summer of 2016. In this paper, we provide the details of this new program, its teaching objectives, and its results. We also briefly discuss future directions and opportunities.

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Project-based, collaborative, algorithmic robotics for high school students: Programming self-driving race cars at MIT

Robots for Education.

Technology literacy for all on one hand and continuous demand for skilled technology engineers and workers on the other hand, poses a challenge to education systems worldwide. Recent years show efforts to integrate technology into all levels of the school curriculum. The work presented here introduces one possible approach to familiarize 5/sup th/ to 6/sup th/ grade pupils with high level technology using a mobile robot as the principal tool in the curriculum. Children construct an open ended, autonomous robot while working in teams (6 per team). Each team is divided into sub-groups that represent the various skills needed for the construction and operation of the robot. They use a flow-chart software as their programming frame. At first, the teams are given simple missions, and as they progress, they are challenged with open-ended, more complex assignments. Each weekly session lasts about three hours of which a third is devoted to knowledge expansion and the rest for testing and construction. During the test phase, pupils perform experiments for deducing device properties (sensor, motor, control method, etc.). They add the device of their choice to their mobile robot system. As a typical open-ended problem, the team explores possible solutions to each problem. Then they are expected to define their solutions and implement Them. At the end of the year there is a contest between robots built by the various teams, to accomplish a predefined task.

N. Orlev

Papers

Robotics learning as a tool for integrating science technology curriculum in K-12 schools