Learning Software Engineering Basics Through Robotics

This paper presents a newly-developed robotics programming course and reports the initial results of software engineering education in robotics context. Robotics programming, as a multidisciplinary course, puts equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics. It teaches students proper software engineering-in particular, modularity and documentation-by having them implement four core robotics algorithms for an educational robot. To evaluate the effect of software engineering education in robotics context, we analyze pre-and post-class survey data and the four assignments our students completed for the course. The analysis suggests that the students acquired an understanding of software engineering techniques and principles.

As robotics becomes increasingly important in technology and therefore in our contemporary society, engineering education needs to increase its offerings related to this new discipline. Since robotics involves topics from several branches of engineering and science, students in this branch need a synthesis of material and techniques from different areas. Our approach is to look at the project lifecycle in robotics software engineering education in the light of experience in existing branches of engineering and to focus on how a synergy can be realized to achieve success in educating students in this new discipline.

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, 2015

This paper presents a new, multidisciplinary robotics programming course, reports initial results, and describes subsequent improvements. With equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics, the course teaches students how software engineering applies to robotics. Students learn independently and interactively and gain hands-on experience by implementing robotics algorithms on a real robot. To understand the effects of the course, we conducted an exit and an 8-month survey and measured software quality of the students' solutions. The analysis shows that the hands-on experience helped everyone learn and retain robotics well, but the students' knowledge gain in software engineering depended on their prior programming knowledge. Based on these findings, we propose improvements to the course. Lastly, we reflect our experience on andragogy, minimalism, and interactive learning.

2009

In the teaching of engineering and computing, one of the major difficulties in modern education is to create an environment to motivate the student to learn, allowing them to assimilate the abstractions of Computer Science with playful and practical actions, The use of robotics in educational environments has proven to be an appropriate tool for the development of activities that involve creating, designing and planning, thereby facilitating the teaching-learning process and further expanding the integration between different areas of knowledge. Robotics in the educational context is called educational robotic and can be defined as an environment acquisition of concepts through mechanical devices, allowing development of logical reasoning and creativity, besides being a multidisciplinary tool for learning. Our goal in this work is to provide an environment for open source programming by using robotics in education and help students to improve their learning of programming languages and software engineering disciplines through a study case where we used the Lego Mindstorms Educational Kit.

Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 2015

Basic Programming is a first year mandatory course of the Computer Engineering degree. Both students and teachers face difficulties in this course, which has high failure and drop-out rates. Several authors have proposed the use of visual programming environments and robots to overcome the difficulties of this course, some of which have been successful. This paper presents the two-year experiment using Lego Robots carried out at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) with around 100 students, along with the results. Satisfactory results have been obtained regarding both motivation and the perception of the students of their learning process; moreover the drop-out rate decreased even though no statistical significance was obtained regarding the final marks of the course. From those results and the analysis of the data it was derived that robot sessions should be more integrated in the curriculum, giving them greater relevance in the final marks. In addition, it is indispensable to classify course students and adapt learning sessions to each student type due to the high student heterogeneity.

31st Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Impact on Engineering and Science Education. Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.01CH37193)

As part of an ongoing initiative to continually revise and improve its introductory computer science courses, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the United States Military Academy has added the use of LEGO Mindstorm robots as part of the active-learning environment used to teach Information Technology IT and programming basics. It is critical for the Army and the Nation that its future leaders understand and are capable of taking advantage of IT. All cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point are required to take a course on IT and problem solving using computer programming. This course is an important first, and sometimes only, opportunity to expose undergraduate students to technology and concepts that will be a part of their daily lives and future careers. The LEGO Mindstorm robots are used in the introductory computer science course to teach fundamental computer programming concepts and introduce the concepts of autonomous vehicles, embedded computer systems and computer simulation. The positive short-term impact on the students taking the course has been substantial and while the long-term impact has yet to be measured, it also has the potential to be substantial. Members of the faculty at West Point developed a computer simulation of the robot environment as well as a Java programming language translator for the LEGO programmable brick, called the RCX. These two tools are combined into a unique programming and teaching environment that we named Jago. Jago enables the robots and robot simulator to be used to teach fundamental programming concepts visually, which some students can more easily grasp and all are clearly excited to use. Based on these results we have incorporated Jago into the core IT course taught at West Point.

Computer, 2010

Problem solving is an important skill for a computer scientist.Mindstorm based robots have been used previously,for teaching programming to computing and engineering students here we look at problem solving.These approaches focus upon the development of problem solving skills and not on learning a new programming language from the outset.Therefore,initially,any programming is kept simple with the minimum of commands,with 'objects' unknowingly used,as these are later introduced/learnt during the programming stage of the computing module.This work suggests that using LEGO robots within the teaching of problem solving and the resulting java GUI emulation has some benefits for the students when learning to program.

Florida Gulf Coast University, College of Engineering has developed over recent years a sophisticated undergraduate software engineering lab for use in embedded systems and related team project courses. A number of teaching modules have been developed, with emphasis on security, complex systems, and webbased access. The objective of the current project is to focus on developing a lab specific to robotics applications, with online access, which can be used across the undergraduate curricula, especially in software engineering courses. Creating an Online Robotics Lab takes advantage of the existing equipment, software and curricular modules to expand them for broader use, and help develop a more advanced full-scale operation across the curriculum. Developing such a lab will have an impact on advancing teaching in disciplines such as Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

2011

Programmable robots like Lego Mindstorms have proven to be an effective mediator to teach computer programming to school children. Therefore several projects that aim at increasing the interest in computer programming and computer science in general use robots as a cornerstone in their course concepts. Handing out robotic kits to the school students who have participated in the courses is not feasible, thus the learning content cannot be repeated and enhanced at home.

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) has shifted the mindsets of engineering students on the importance of IT skills for current and future engineering related jobs. Nowadays, programming is the most fundamental skill that needs to be learnt by the students using mBot technology. The mBot technology is consider as programmable educational robot designed for beginners to learn basic programming concepts which can be assessed and evaluated via bloom's taxonomy framework. It can be a daunting task to learn programming, especially to new students who do not have any prior experience in coding. Average and low performing students are lacking algorithmic skills, where they could not visualize how the programming concepts work. Therefore, this paper presents the effectiveness of using robot to improve students’ learning of the programming concepts. In designing the learning modules, bloom’s taxonomy model and problem-based learning are adopted using mBot. Moreover, a low-cost and p...