The educational impact of the Robotic Autonomy mobile robotics course

Abstract: "Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to thirty students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and curriculum used in the course were designed so that the students would be able to achieve high levels of robot competency during class and would be able to keep the robots after completing the class, enabling continued exploration at home. In conjunction with course design, the authors at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Discovery Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy. This article describes the educational analysis methodology and the statistically significant results of our analysis, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning, well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics."