DEVELOPMENT OF A SENIOR LEVEL ROBOTICS COURSE FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Abstract

For Spring 2011, a senior-level robotics course (first taught in Spring 2010) had been revised according to principles for “Smart Teaching” described in the book “How Learning Works”. Homework, laboratory sessions and anchor projects had been redesigned to provide better scaffolding for students with 2 different but complementary engineering backgrounds, and also for a better flow towards the theme of hu-manoid robotics. The e-portfolio tool EMMA was integrated into this course as a collaboration and feedback tool between instructor and stu-dents to help improve student algorithm devel-opment work, but EMMA was not found to be responsive enough nor useful for this kind of use. Student responses had been very positive to the project-based approach of this new course, but they had found challenging the sub-ject of Zigbee communications programming between robots and were not confident in C++ programming techniques as they should.