An Innovative Low Cost Educational Underwater Robotics Platform for Promoting Engineering Interest among Secondary School Students

Abstract

The presented article describes the design features of an educational robotics project addressed for secondary school students and carried out at the University of Girona (UdG). The project, called Underwater Robotics Workshop, is about the students building an underwater exploration robotic vehicle using low-cost materials. Its ultimate objective is to promote engineering interest among students and motivate them to direct their future studies towards engineering degrees. The main purpose of this article is to describe this activity and to promote it. Versatility and adaptation are key values as the activity has been designed to be adapted to convenience or replicated. It is a continuation work of a previously published articles, now describing different technological adaptations related to the design of the vehicle’s controller, and the gathered experiences from added workshop celebrations in the recent years. The workshop has been defined as a project-based learning approach where the students learn about physics, engineering, electronics, programming, and robotics, as well as to use all kinds of working tools, according to the maker philosophy. To date, the opinions collected from the participants encourage continuation of the activity and, at the same time, ask for the introduction of novelties to keep the workshop updated with the contents of the subjects related to technology and sciences. This project is being held for more than 13 years in the UdG. More than 800 secondary school students have participated in the activity, building about 200 underwater vehicles in more than 50 editions of the workshop.