Online robotics technology course design by balancing workload and affect

Abstract

This paper describes our course design approach that successfully transformed an undergraduate Robotics Technology course from in-person teaching to online guided by the TASKS model. Our course redesign process includes identifying conflicts, generating solutions, self-evaluation, and analyses of design solutions. We carefully balanced between Workload and students’ Affect, by designing comparable workloads as before, as well as maintaining students’ motivation similarly at the in-person level. Transforming this course consisting of lecture sessions and lab sessions with hardware and software elements yielded a set of course activities and teaching practices applicable to online teaching of other courses. When physical robots become unavailable, simulation projects were designed as alternatives and simulated versions of those physical projects used in face-to-face classroom. These simulation projects are in the areas of autonomous mobile robots, robotic manipulator, and advanced robotic control on MATLAB-ROS, respectively. Comparisons with past in-person results confirm that effective learning has been achieved remotely, having maintained student’s performance and motivation.

Environment-Based Design (Ebd): Using Only Necessary Knowledge for Designer Creativity

“…EBD has been effectively applied in various fields, including generating design requirements in medical device design (Chen et al, 2005), developing a manual of quality management systems in the industry (Sun et al, 2011), solving enterprise applications integrations problem (Tan et al, 2012), developing a model for design chain management (Liu and Zeng, 2009), and analysing human factors (Mohammadi et al, 2022;Wen et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2021). It has also been applied in education (Ma et al, 2022;Ommi and Zeng, 2018;Su et al, 2022), organizational management (Wang et al, 2017), and health domain. This paper intends to explain how the EBD improves the effectiveness of knowledge use for designer creativity.…”

Prioritizing actions and outcomes for community-based future manufacturing workforce development and education

“…While this research does not directly define educational design requirements, findings from this work can support future educational design efforts. A number of prior studies have examined the application of educational design for introducing students and educators to advanced technologies such as augmented reality (Garzón et al, 2020;Gerup et al, 2020), virtual reality (Radianti et al, 2020;Soliman et al, 2021), additive manufacturing (Motyl & Filippi, 2021;Pei et al, 2019), digital twins (Keaveney et al, 2021;Toivonen et al, 2018), and cyberlearning (Ma et al, 2022;Raoufi, 2020).…”

Development of a Raspberry PI-Controlled VEX Robot for a Robotics Technology Course

“…The department of Computer Engineering Technology (CET) offers "CET 4952: Robotics Technology" [1,2] as a technical elective to its students in the CET baccalaureate program. The course is structured to have a 3-hour lecture session and a 3-hour lab session each week.…”

“…Its course learning objective is to address fundamental subjects in both Autonomous Mobile Robots and Robotic Manipulators, as well as preparing students with necessary knowledge and skills in robotic programming, design, and system integration. Theories and algorithms such as waypoint navigation, map building, obstacle avoidance, and trajectory generation are discussed in the lecture sessions, while lab sessions focus on the application of this knowledge using physical robots [1,2].…”

“…The pandemic urged us to focus on computer-based simulation projects in the past two years [2], but recent requests for more in-person activities have driven expansion of physical experiments. In one project mentioned above, i.e., the vision-based control of Raspberry PI-enhanced VEX robot, the Raspberry PI was integrated with a standard VEX robot (consisting of a mobile base and its micro-controller, the Cortex).…”