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Androutsopoulos, Kelly ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8257-1867,
Aristodemou, Leonidas, Boender, Jaap, Bottone, Michele, Currie, Edward ORCID logoORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1186-5547, El-Aroussi, Inas, Fields, Bob ORCID logoORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1117-1844, Gheri, Lorenzo, Gorogiannis, Nikos ORCID
logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8660-6609, Heeney, Michael, Micheletti, Matteo,
Loomes, Martin J., Margolis, Michael, Petridis, Miltos, Piermarteri, Andrea, Primiero, Giuseppe,
Raimondi, Franco ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9508-7713 and Weldin, Nick
(2018) MIRTO: an open-source robotic platform for education. ECSEE’18: Proceedings of the
3rd European Conference of Software Engineering Education. In: 3rd European Conference on
Software Engineering Education, 14-15 June 2018, Seeon, Germany. ISBN 9781450363839.
[Conference or Workshop Item] (doi:10.1145/3209087.3209106)
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2
MIRTO: an Open-Source Robotic Platform for
Education
K. Androutsopoulos L. Aristodemou J. Boender
M. Bottone E. Currie I. El-Aroussi B. Fields
L. Gheri N. Gorogiannis M. Heeney M. Micheletti
M. Loomes M. Margolis M. Petridis A. Piermarteri
G. Primiero F. Raimondi N. Weldin
June 14, 2018
Abstract
This paper introduces the MIddlesex RoboTic platfOrm (MIRTO), an
open-source platform that has been used for teaching First Year Computer
Science students since the academic year 2013/2014, with the aim of pro-
viding a physical manifestation of Software Engineering concepts that are
often delivered using only abstract or synthetic case studies. In this paper
we provide a detailed description of the platform, whose hardware spec-
ifications and software libraries are all released open source; we describe
a number of teaching usages of the platform, report students’ projects,
and evaluate some of its aspects in terms of effectiveness, usability, and
maintenance.
1 Introduction
In 2013 the Department of Computer Science at Middlesex University took the
decision of re-designing the first year of the Computer Science degree, with the
aim of addressing some of the issues with the previous course format: progressive
disengagement, negative feedback about course content in terms of employabil-
ity and “practical” experience, low attendance rate, etc. Due to the diverse
range of academic backgrounds of first year students at Middlesex University,
another problem to be addressed was the definition of a course format that could
accommodate a non-uniform class of students.
The teaching team decided to adopt a problem-based approach to teach-
ing, with a focus on the so-called inverted curriculum where students learn
theory whilst they are doing practical exercises [11] and project-centered de-
livery, providing detailed material that students could use in workshops un-
der the supervision of members of staff. Assessment is performed on a daily
basis through so-called Student Observable Behaviours (SOBs), which can be
1
Figure 1: MIRTO fully assembled (front and rear views)
thought of as fine-grained learning outcomes, or capabilities, such as “Build
and test simple combinatorial logic circuits using at least two different gates
in hardware” or “Write a simple recursive function to carry out a well-defined
task over lists or integers, test the function and explain how it works”. Ob-
servation of behaviours is supported by a bespoke assessment tool available at
https://bitbucket.org/mdxmase/sobmonitor, with the aim of addressing the
known limitations of self-paced learning and constructivist approaches [16, 12]:
indeed, while students can work in a very flexible way, we are nevertheless able
to track their progress both in terms of attendance and progress.
The teaching team decided to place particular emphasis on physical mani-
festations of computing through the use of hardware resources, in an attempt
to create a syntonic environment (in the sense of [14]), in which students could
“establish a firm connection between personal activity and the creation of for-
mal knowledge”. This approach is particularly useful for code comprehension,
but also to cover with practical and concrete projects some of the topics typical
of Software Engineering, such as agile development in a team, continuous in-
tegration, and test-driven development. More specifically, physical computing
provides an opportunity for conceptual blending [8]: by asking students to work
in both abstract and physical spaces, they create blends that enable rich con-
versations — the behaviour of their code blends with the behaviour of a robot
(or device), and the latter is observable in explicit ways.
In this paper we present MIRTO, the MIddlesex RoboTic platfOrm, show-
ing how it can be used to cover several of the Knowledge Areas in the ACM
Computer Science curriculum [10], with a particular focus on the Software Engi-
neering knowledge area. In particular, we provide hardware details in Section 2
and software details in Section 3; example applications for teaching and students
projects are reported in Section 4, while an evaluation and a comparison with
other existing platforms are provided in Section 5. We conclude in Section 6.
2 Hardware details
Mirto is a two-wheel robot of circular shape, with a diameter of approximately
20 cm and height 10 cm, see Figure 1. The main components are:
2
Figure 2: MIRTO PCB
• A pair of 5 V 1:34 geared motors with encoders connected to 1/10 scale
car wheels.
• Off-the-shelf components: bump contact sensors, infra-red sensors, poten-
tiometer, digital switch, piezo buzzer, 5-line LCD screen.
• A Teensy 3.2 micro-controller: this is an Arduino-compatible ARM micro-
controller running at 72 MHz, 256 Kbytes of flash memory, 64 Kbytes of
RAM, 33 usable PINs, USB and serial communication ports.
• The wheels and the off-the-shelf components are connected to the Teensy
micro-controller by means of a bespoke printed circuit board (PCB) that
has been designed at Middlesex (see Figure 2); the design files of the
PCB are released open source (see links below) and several companies are
available to print them.
• A Raspberry Pi version 3 with 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, 1 Gbyte
RAM, built-in WiFi, 4 USB ports, HDMI, composite audio output and
40-pin GPIO header. The PCB plugs into the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins
and communicates with the Teensy over a serial channel. Software details
are reported in the next section.
3
