New environment for learning by doing in mechatronics education

Abstract

A global scenario for a course of mechatronics is presented.The course is divided in several steps mixing individual distant learning and experimentation at home with remote support from the teachers, and work in teams to encourage collaboration.What is new with respect to previous ways of teaching mechatronics is that it focuses not on technical skills, but on the process of building on skills acquired in other, specialized courses and developing a multidisciplinary product with constrained resources and time.Many elements of the course have been proposed in the framework of a mobile robot competition to students of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zrich and other engineering schools.Preliminary results are given.