Teaching Marker-based Augmented Reality in a PBL Based Online Robotics Competition

Abstract

e-Yantra is a robotics outreach project funded by MHRD, Govt of India, and hosted at IIT Bombay. It organizes e-Yantra Robotics Competition (eYRC), an annual robotics competition that teaches robotics concepts scalably to college students. Last year 34500+ students registered in the competition out of which 800 students participated in a theme called “Thirsty Crow” which taught augmented reality concepts. In this paper, we illustrate how “project-based learning” may be used to teach complex skills in a “game-like” context. We demonstrate how we designed, experimented and implemented the concepts of “Marker Based Augmented Reality” using open source technologies such as OpenCV, OpenGL, and Blender. We demonstrate in this paper that the average completion rate of our theme (which is essentially a hardware-based MOOC) is 11% which is greater than the overall average completion rate of all themes in eYRC-2018 (which is 6.2%). Our work is useful to anyone wishing to incorporate augmented reality in teaching courses, generally in the area of computer science.