The Educational Effects of Practical Manufacturing Activities in Graduation Research

Abstract

In recent years, in many educational institutions, PBL leaning has been introduced and there have been many cases of robots being used as learning material. The educational attempts using robot contests and the effects have been reported. One robot contest, the NHK Student Robocon, tests the skills of university, technical college, and polytechnic students. The contest challenges of the NHK Student Robocon require an extremely high level of skill. A research group of authors has worked at the NHK Student Robocon since 2009. In this article, our ten years of activity at the NHK Robocon is summarized, and we will give a description of the technical background of the mechanism and the control methods of manufactured robots. In addition, the contest’s educational effects during both a fiscal year of entry and a fiscal year of non-entry are verified through a comparison of the scores of a Robocon-related subject group before and after participating in the NHK Student Robocon. Consequently, we will report the results (knowledge).