An Innovative Low Cost Educational Underwater Robotics Platform for Promoting Engineering Interest among Secondary School Students

Abstract

The presented article describes the design features of an educational robotics project addressed for secondary school students and carried out at the University of Girona (UdG). The project, called Underwater Robotics Workshop, is about the students building an underwater exploration robotic vehicle using low-cost materials. Its ultimate objective is to promote engineering interest among students and motivate them to direct their future studies towards engineering degrees. The main purpose of this article is to describe this activity and to promote it. Versatility and adaptation are key values as the activity has been designed to be adapted to convenience or replicated. It is a continuation work of a previously published articles, now describing different technological adaptations related to the design of the vehicle’s controller, and the gathered experiences from added workshop celebrations in the recent years. The workshop has been defined as a project-based learning approach where the students learn about physics, engineering, electronics, programming, and robotics, as well as to use all kinds of working tools, according to the maker philosophy. To date, the opinions collected from the participants encourage continuation of the activity and, at the same time, ask for the introduction of novelties to keep the workshop updated with the contents of the subjects related to technology and sciences. This project is being held for more than 13 years in the UdG. More than 800 secondary school students have participated in the activity, building about 200 underwater vehicles in more than 50 editions of the workshop.

Employing an underwater vehicle in education as a learning tool for Python programming

“…Despite the existence of numerous vehicles (e.g., ground, aerial, and marine), the existing EDUVs are limited to physical interaction and are used to teach mainly mechanics, control, and hydrodynamics [2,14,42]. The proposed platform is designed to utilize an underwater vehicle [35] through an online platform for programming education using both text-based and block-based programming.…”

Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Skills for Sustainability in the Educational Robotics Classroom

“…It is important to emphasize that the use of diverse educational resources in the robotics classroom makes it possible to adjust the economic cost of the materials and tools to the possibilities of the educational centers, with low-cost possibilities for an economical didactic implementation [35]. This allows the implementation of practical sustainability during the teaching process in the school classroom, being able to reuse computer and electronic materials for other purposes and adapt them to activities oriented to the learning of educational robotics (programming, 3D design, etc.…”

Multiplatform of SVC Device for User Experience Mobile Robot Teleoperation

“…There are several studies related to control in robot using joystick including Rahman et al [50], Prabhakar el al. [51] and smartphones including Irawan et al [52], Chamim et al [36] Nadvornik et al [53] and El-Fakdi et al [54]. However, those studies do not provide camera visualization for the user.…”