Increasing Accessibility To A First Year Engineering Course In Mobile Autonomous Robotics

Abstract

Introductory classes in the design and programming of mobile autonomous robots offer both potential and matriculated engineering students entertaining and engaging educational experiences that give them early experience with the kinds of open ended design problems they will face in their professional careers. By their nature, however, these classes often require some prior computer programming experience -which raises the threshold of entry to the very early career students who might most benefit from the extra motivation and depth provided by dealing with open-ended problems. In previous work we discussed minimizing dollar cost and maximizing physical access to a robot by creating a WWW/web cam based infrastructure and supporting open sourced robot simulation software. In this work, we will focus on additional work that addresses more fundamental pedagogical issues including ease of collaboration among geographically dispersed students and the design of educational materials more suitable for maintaining low threshold, high ceiling educational experiences for the students.