Developing Courseware for Robotics in Pre-engineering Education for High School Students
Jonathan Zubarriain, Nicholas Kumia, Shouling He · 2015
Incorporating robotics into the STEM initiative is an essential part of keeping students relevant and competitive in a global economy.This paper presents an original way of developing courseware for an introductory Robotics course as part of a six-week pre-college engineering summer program.The goal of the course was to expose high school students to Robotics engineering and involve the students in robot designing and building, programming and troubleshooting, collaborative writing, and presentation.After the class, students from diverse academic backgrounds are expected to be well prepared for a college level engineering curriculum.The six-week program consisted of four stages, introduction to Robotics engineering, hardware design, robotics programming, and project development.The application of this courseware proved to be an effective way for students to realize their academic capabilities and engage themselves in group projects.The course was held at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in Queens, New York.By the end of the course, nearly all students exhibited a much better comprehension of engineering than they did at the first class meeting.The future improvements of the courseware can be made by preparing a wider array of supplies such as different sensors, various motors and chassis building materials.This would allow high school students to have more options during the robotic design and implementation process, which would result in more demanding brainstorming sessions.Exposing students to challenging concepts will make it easier for them to solve more complex problems when they move on to college to pursue a career in engineering.