Mobile Robots in Teaching Programming for IT Engineers and its Effects

Pásztor, Attila; Pap-Szigeti, Róbert; Török, Erika

doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2013.041123

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…CHERP (Creative Hybrid Environment for Robotic Programming) was developed that enabled children to dedicate their time building robot, planning its actions, using a physical wooden block or the computer screen to construct programs, and iteratively improving the robot and programs according to initial goals and subsequent discoveries. Attila et al (2013) developed a tool to make the learning process of programming languages more concrete, practical and interesting for students, with an optimal environment and strongly limited set of statements. Park et al (2015) developed systematic and effective robot-based learning with programming to improve learner's creativity and understand class satisfaction at the elementary school level in Korea.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tool Support for Learning Computer and Robot Programming

2020

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2020)

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Computer Programming is believed to have effect on creativity, reasoning, analytic and mathematical skills. This cognitive development is at a cost from both ends of students and teachers of computer programming. Its abstractive nature makes it difficult to teach and learn hence, the enormous hours spent in teaching, learning and developing solutions. Consequently, the less interest among the students at all levels of education. Studies have shown various attempts to ease its teaching and learning by developing user friendly interfaces and use of course video teaching clips from seasoned programmers. However, learning and teaching programming skills remains a herculean task for student and teachers respectively. It is believed that interacting with a more tangible object can improve students' interest in developing computer programming skills. A mobile robot-a situated and embodied electronic device serves this purpose hence, the use of the device that students have more interest in interacting with in this study. In this work, an interactive program evaluation framework was developed that interact with a simulated e-puck robot on V-Rep simulator platform. The study shows an increased interest and improved performance in computer programming among Computer Science students.

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Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tool Support for Learning Computer and Robot Programming

2020

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2020)

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“…Firstly, this new course uses MATLAB to control LEGO robots. Previous programming languages used for learning programming using LEGO robots were NQC [2], [3], NXC [3], ROBOLAB [2], [4], Legos Mindstorm iconic language [5], Java [6], and Visual Basic [2]. Out of these options, MATLAB was chosen for this new course for several reasons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Approach to Teaching the Foundational Concepts of Programming Using LEGO and Matlab

Yoon

2023 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Learning programming can be challenging for newly admitted engineering students. It may be even more challenging in two-year colleges due to the broad spectrum of student populations, which includes both traditional and non-traditional students. Students who have been out of school for several years after high school may find programming particularly challenging, while students who have just graduated from high school may find it less so. To overcome this challenge, it is suggested to teach programming using familiar tools from the very beginner level to the intermediate level. This paper proposes a new course to teach the foundational concepts of programming using LEGO EV3, a robotics toolkit, and MATLAB to control the LEGO robots. The course consists of three parts: Basics, Assigned Projects, and Student-Led Projects. In the Basics part, students learn fundamental programming concepts such as algorithms, flowcharts, variables, input/output, IF statements, and loop structures. Systematically designed application problems are provided to enhance understanding of programming basics. In the Basics part, students write code to control LEGO robots and solve application problems. This helps students overcome their unfamiliarity with programming, as they can see how the robots move interactively as they program. After completing the Basics part, students will work on two assigned projects: a line-tracking robot and a cleaning robot. Guided problems are provided to help students complete these projects. After students complete the assigned projects, students will undertake a Student-Led project. For this project, they will design an engineering product of their choice and build it using LEGO EV3 and MATLAB. To evaluate the effectiveness of the new course, the level of difficulty and repetition of application problems and guided problems were measured, along with the applicability of active learning activities. The measured data shows that the level of difficulty gradually increases overall from the beginner level, which helps students build foundational concepts of programming as beginners. It also shows that the topics in the Basics part are systematically repeated in the application problems and guided problems, which enhances learning retention of the topics. Additionally, the data shows that the learning methods used in this course lead to a higher percentage of active learning activities with higher complexity, making this course more beneficial for students. To evaluate the effectiveness of this proposed course, it is recommended to offer this course for a few semesters and conduct surveys at the end of each semester to collect feedback and measure its effectiveness.

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