MOBILE ROBOT D.I.Y. - A MODERN PROJECT BASED EDUCATION METHOD
MOBILE ROBOT D.I.Y. - A MODERN PROJECT BASED EDUCATION METHOD

Summary/Abstract: In the academic world, masters degree course and seminar attendance is a general administrative concern as more and more students fail to see the importance of the course domain, mostly due to the lack of self studying and experimentation. One example are robotics courses where students rarely understand the connection between mathematical and physics expressions and the real world, until they are faced with a real problem in this domain and must solve it without the help of the teacher, most often during a seminar. Because of the fact that in a semester, there is a limited number of seminars, a project based education method has the main advantage of continuous learning throughout the semester. This study presents a modern, team based project approach where the students are given a fully functional moving robot and have the task of studying, implementing and understanding the underling mathematical expressions in order to improve the robot in various ways. Some of the improvement goals are as follows: constructing a mathematical movement model, adding more sensors, handling errors, creating a remote control using an Android application, ultimately automating the robot's movement. The students are encouraged to research the various domains involved (computer science, mathematics, physics, electronics) in order to fully comprehend the complexity of each task and also to improve their self-learning abilities. This paper describes the measures taken by the teacher in order to ensure that the students are constantly following their current objective and gradually learn how to answer many questions on their own. Each task has individual goals which are presented by the teacher, along with certain study directions that will be useful in achieving the given goal. The student has to implement a running solution of the given assignment and to document his research.

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