Educational evaluation of project-based robotics courses

A questionnaire was used on existing courses at the three institutes to examine aspects of the current state of robotics education. It was designed in Hannover and used on students from three different undergraduate classes. The testbeds were:
  • Lego project "Mobile Service Robotics" within a hardware lab at Hannover
  • Experimental robotics class at Stanford
  • Autonomous Systems course at KTH
There were two versions of the questionnaire: one for students and one for teachers. The detailed results provide useful information to the teachers on individual aspects of the courses and help improve the courses in the future.

Brief summary of findings:

Lego Project "Mobile Service Robotics" in Hannover, February 2003 + 2004

For this evaluation within MoRob, the mini-project within our hardware lab was one of the courses to be looked at. At the end of the course students had to fill out a questionnaire. A few insights can be reported after this part of the evaluation with our Lego participants: within the problem-based learning task, students could bring in their own ideas to a large extent and had to acquire new knowledge on their own. The tutor only had to give little directions and students could organize their work freely. Teamwork and communication skills were felt to be among the most important things learned during this project. Many students felt that this was the best or most interesting project work they had ever done. Overall, the students judged the Lego platform and its environment as positive and appropriate. However, there were a large number of individual comments highlighting the shortcomings of this platform, for example: imprecise sensors, limited software, small memory, problems with multithreading and arithmetic. This confirmed that the Lego platform reaches its limitations very easily (programming power, sensors, scalability, mechanical robustness, etc.), and that it is inappropriate for other than simple tasks, and that we need a more sophisticated robot platform.
Students were highly motivated on this course and usually achieved more than was expected. For example, the quality of presentations was higher than expected, showing that the students put in a lot of effort to show their work. One group even had the first prototype ready from the time the kits were handed over until the first official group meeting, where the project was meant to be kicked off. Similar observations have been made in other Lego projects as well.

Further description in platforms section
Further info about the hardware lab (in German)
Download of course materials (in German)

See our gallery for more pictures.


RTS Mini-Projekt "Autonome Service-Roboter 2003": Stream (This requires Quicktime 6)
Video (.mov,17MB)

RTS Mini-Projekt "Autonome Service-Roboter 2004": Stream (This requires Quicktime 6 or RealOne Player)
Video (.mp4, 9MB) (MPEG1, 35MB)


Autonomous Systems course at KTH, June 2003

At KTH, the "Autonomous Systems" class was the subject of the evaluation. The aim of the course was that students design a robot that can participate in a hockey tournament. The evaluation clearly demonstrated that the course is highly inspiring and many students have their first encounter with hardware design and low-level driver design. Overall the class is extremely well received and it has a very good reputation with the students. The design of low-level computer software is at the same time frustrating from a debugging point of view, which has resulted in a re-design of some of the lectures and a slight redesign of the course for 2004.

Experimental Robotics class at Stanford, June 2003

During the experimental robotics class given at Stanford last spring, students were trained to use the new environment by programming small micro projects. These exercises were intended to present the various functionalities of this new framework and illustrate theoretical concepts presented during the class. Later these students developed their personal final project based on the experience acquired with the introductory lessons. For this first evaluation, we measured the effort and difficulties encountered for understanding and manipulating each module of the toolkit. In the overall, the students appreciated the more advanced GUI tools developed for this class but experienced a slightly more difficult learning curve when developing their own modules since more understanding of the overall software architecture was necessary. The feedback and comments from this first evaluation will be used to modify certain aspects of the software architecture and functionalities.