Using mixed reality to facilitate education in robotics and AI
John E. Anderson, Jacky Baltes · 2009
Using robots as part of any curriculum requires careful man-agement of the significant complexity that physical embod-iment introduces. Students need to be made aware of this complexity without being overwhelmed by it, and navigat-ing students through this complexity is the biggest challenge faced by an instructor. Achieving this requires a framework that allows complexity to be introduced in stages, as students’ abilities improve. Such a framework should also be flexible enough to provide a range of application environments that can grow with student sophistication, and be able to quickly change between applications. It should be portable and main-tainable, and require a minimum of overhead to manage in a classroom. Finally, the framework should provide repeata-bility and control for evaluating the students ’ work, as well as for performing research. In this paper, we discuss the ad-vantages of a mixed reality approach to applying robotics to education in order to accomplish these challenges. We intro-duce a framework for managing mixed reality in the class-room, and discuss our experiences with using this framework for teaching robotics and AI.