Work in Progress: Robot Contests as an element of motivation and professional improvement in students

Abstract

The Department of Electronics of the University of Alcala in Spain has been organizing a mobile robot contest annually since 2000 with an increasing participation of students from all around Spain and some foreign countries. The current paper presents the design of a research project consisted on a study of the influences that participation in this robot contest brings to engineering students academic and professional development. The study will be done to 450 persons that participated where they were engineering students (19 to 23 years old). Results are expected by the first semester of 2007