A Holistic Approach to Use Educational Robots for Supporting Computer Science Courses

Abstract

Robots are intelligent machines that are capable of autonomously performing intricate sequences of actions, with their functionality being primarily driven by computer programs and machine learning models. Educational robots are specifically designed and used for teaching and learning purposes and attain the interest of learners in gaining knowledge about science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Educational robots are widely applied in different fields of primary and secondary education, but their usage in teaching higher education subjects is limited. Even when educational robots are used in tertiary education, the use is sporadic, targets specific courses or subjects, and employs robots with narrow applicability. In this work, we propose a holistic approach to the use of educational robots in tertiary education. We demonstrate how an open source educational robot can be used by colleges, and universities in teaching multiple courses of a computer science curriculum, fostering computational and creative thinking in practice. We rely on an open-source and open design educational robot, called FOSSBot, which contains various IoT technologies for measuring data, processing it, and interacting with the physical world. Grace to its open nature, FOSSBot can be used in preparing the content and supporting learning activities for different subjects such as electronics, computer networks, artificial intelligence, computer vision, etc. To support our claim, we describe a computer science curriculum containing a wide range of computer science courses and explain how each course can be supported by providing indicative activities. The proposed one-year curriculum can be delivered at the postgraduate level, allowing computer science graduates to delve deep into Computer Science subjects. After examining related works that propose the use of robots in academic curricula we detect the gap that still exists for a curriculum that is linked to an educational robot and we present in detail each proposed course, the software libraries that can be employed for each course and the possible extensions to the open robot that will allow to further extend the curriculum with more topics or enhance it with activities. With our work, we show that by incorporating educational robots in higher education we can address this gap and provide a new ledger for boosting tertiary education.