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While parallel programming, particularly on graphics processing units (GPUs), and numerical optimization hold immense potential to tackle real-world computational challenges across disciplines, their inherent complexity and technical demands often act as daunting barriers to entry. This, unfortunately, limits accessibility and diversity within these crucial areas of computer science. To combat this challenge and ignite excitement among undergraduate learners, we developed an application-driven course, harnessing robotics as a lens to demystify the intricacies of these topics making them tangible and engaging. Our course's prerequisites are limited to the required undergraduate introductory core curriculum, opening doors for a wider range of students. Our course also features a large final-project component to connect theoretical learning to applied practice. In our first offering of the course we attracted 27 students without prior experience in these topics and found that an overwhelming majority of the students felt that they learned both technical and soft skills such that they felt prepared for future study in these fields.
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WIP: Development of a Student-Centered Personalized Learning Framework to Advance Undergraduate Robotics Education
This paper presents a work-in-progress on a learning system that will provide robotics students with a personalized learning environment. This addresses both the scarcity of skilled robotics instructors, particularly in community colleges and the expensive demand for training equipment. The study of robotics at the college level represents a wide range of interests, experiences, and aims. This project works to provide students the flexibility to adapt their learning to their own goals and prior experience. We are developing a system to enable robotics instruction through a web-based interface that is compatible with less expensive hardware. Therefore, the free distribution of teaching materials will empower educators. This project has the potential to increase the number of robotics courses offered at both two- and four-year schools and universities. The course materials are being designed with small units and a hierarchical dependency tree in mind; students will be able to customize their course of study based on the robotics skills they have already mastered. We present an evaluation of a five module mini-course in robotics. Students indicated that they had a positive experience with the online content. They also scored the experience highly on relatedness, mastery, and autonomy perspectives, demonstrating strong motivation potential for this approach.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2142360
- PAR ID:
- 10508690
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-3642-9
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- College Station, TX, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343234
