Collaborative problem solving

Abstract

This report describes our experience in teaching an experimental graduate-level course employing collaborative teaching and learning. It was co-taught by four instructors with various backgrounds in computer science, including mecha-tronics and computational geometry. The course was designed to attract students with either systems or theory backgrounds and during the semester, they identified cooperative robotics problems in active areas of research. The course culminated in collaborative projects where teams of students designed, built and programmed teams of autonomous robots out of Lego MindStorms to solve one of the problems identified earlier. We review our experience with this course, both as teachers and as students. Three of us were the instructors and four of us were the students.