Practicing Engineering in a First-Year Student Project: MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms

Abstract

Besides lectures of theoretical foundations, con- temporary teaching and learning concepts for first semester students consider more and more practically motivated courses. In this context, a new first-year student introduc- tion course in practical engineering is established in the first semester curriculum of Electrical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Based on a threefold learning concept, programming skills in MATLAB are taught to 309 students within a full-time block course laboratory. The st u- dents were encouraged to transfer known mathematical ba- sics to program algorithms and real-world applications per - formed by 100 LEGO Mindstorms robots. Therefore a new MATLAB toolbox and twofold project tasks were developed by a small team of supervisors. Furthermore the students were supervised by over 60 tutors at 23 institutes and en- couraged to create their own robotics applications. We de- scribe how the laboratory motivates the students to act and think like engineers to solve real-world issues with limite d resources. The given evaluation results show that the pro- posed practical course concept successfully boosts the stu - dents' motivation, advanced their programming skills, and encourages the peer learning process.