Building robots as a tool to motivate students into an engineering education

Abstract

Abstract—Today, robots have become an integral part of our society: children have robot pets, mobile robots are mowing our lawn and robot arms are assembling cars. Since people are clearly fascinated by these mechanical slaves, we were wondering: why not use robots as a tool to teach more abstract concepts in a practical way. Recently, a new course was added to the first year of the Bachelor’s in the engineering program at Ghent University. In this course, first year students have the opportunity to get more hands-on experience through several projects. In this article we focus on one of these, titled ‘How to build your own intelligent robot’. This work covers our approach for the practical sessions. Additionally, we elaborate on the low-cost robot platform that was built specially for this course, and which can be used easily by other schools or universities. Two years after the introduction of the robot project, we find that students not only like the sessions, but are very motivated to solve problems which would be otherwise considered too abstract and tedious. Y r