Using robots for teaching computer science

Software	Software for controlling some sort of robot
Covers	Psychology of programming, Human factors, artificial intelligence
Skills Required	Interest in AI and autonomous systems, interest in education
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ??? Programming ??

Brief Description

How can robots be used to teach programming skills concepts in computer science?

The aim of this project is to develop a practical proposal for how to do some educating using robots, by getting students to carry out one or more tasks in getting the robot to behave in a particular way, or by getting the students to have a particular kind of interaction with the robots and learning appropriate lessons from the experience. The target is to create a learning experience that can be run with students as a coherent off-the-shelf package. This should focus on a particular educational objective and a particular target group of students (whether primary school children or undergraduate computer scientists), and get into detail about exactly how the learning experiences should work.

Ideally the practical proposal for an educational experience should be tested and the effectiveness of the approach evaluated from observation. Doing this will require careful consideration of the ethical issues and how to manage the interaction between the students and the system. The evaluation should consider both whether the students can do the tasks set and whether they learn the intended skills and concepts from them.

Although this isn't primarily a system development project, a good understanding will be needed of how to get the chosen robot system to behave, as well as of the target computer science knowledge.

A project for a BCS-accredited undergraduate degree will need some element of system design and coding. Including this will need access to an appropriate hardware and software. If in doubt consult your programme leader.

Variants

This could be done with real robots, but that requires access to appropriate hardware.

While real robots are more fun, they require the hardware and take up space. It might be possible to get a long way with virtual robots behaving on screen. This has been tried in varoious systems including Logo and Turtle Graphics, which appeared in 1967.

A rather different project would look at the range of what has been done in using robots and robot-like systems to teach computing concepts and programming (which is necessary background for a practical robot education project anyway) and explore more generally what works in which circumstances and why.

Back to