Building ArtBots to attract students into STEM learning

There is an increasing worldwide demand for people educated into science and technology. Unfortunately, girls and underprivileged students are often underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education programs. We believe that by inclusion of art in these programs, educational activities might become more attractive to a broader audience. In this work we present an example of such an educational activity: an international robotics and art week for secondary school students. This educational activity builds up on the project-based and inquiry learning framework. This article is intended as a brief manual to help others organise such an activity. It also gives insights in how we led a highly heterogeneous group of students into learning STEM and becoming science and technology ambassadors for their peers

Robot competitions trick students into learning

It has been shown in the past that robots help to bring theoretical concepts into practice, while at the same time increasing the motivation of the students. Despite these benefits, robots are hardly ever integrated in education programs and at the same time students feel that they have the competences nor the infrastructure to build a robot on their own. Therefore the workgroup electronics (WELEK) of Ghent University gives students the opportunity to build a robot by organizing workshops and competitions. Up until now, four competitions were organized in which over 200 students voluntarily participated. This paper describes our approach in the hope that it will inspire other educators to do the same thing. We also measured the effectiveness of our competitions by sending each of the participants a questionnaire. The results confirm that students acquire relevant technical competences by building a robot, learn to work as a team and are challenged to use their creativity

Positive Influence Of Education Partnerships For Teaching Integrated STEM Through Drone Competition

While enhancing the STEM career pipeline through improved quality and quantity of STEM teaching available to an ever-widening diversity is K-12 students is garnering significant attention across the U.S., there lacks widely adopted implementation and support models that efficiently make full advantage of the vast human and fiscal resources available. A wide swath of STEM education stake-holding partners—schools, businesses, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and institutions of higher education—frequently are compelled to provide support and guidance but lack easy to follow pathways in order to do so. This research study describes and documents a unique vehicle to bring often disparate partners to a unified effort under the banner of drone education designed to improve STEM and technology-oriented career pathways. Identified barriers that the collaborative partnership helped overcome to ensure success include providing: modest start-up costs for modern high-tech equipment for participating schools (drones); an infrastructure for leveraging the consistently successful approach to providing regional and statewide competitive events (precision drone flight and knowledge competitions); large-scale buildings and facilities to host competitive festivals and events (e.g., indoor sports stadiums); and K-12 teacher professional development programs along with classroom-ready instructional materials needed to nurture and sustain student drone education programs

MBJ IQP 1301

The Lunar Base Exhibit Project is an IQP which hopes to educate students of fifth grade to ninth grade based on the Massachusetts math and science curriculum. At the same time, it is a project of designing the exhibit program to create a unique entertainment environment that will stimulate the students’ curiosity and interest. The project will discuss the history of the moon related to mankind, resources, risk and purpose of living on the moon. Some background on the auditorium where the exhibit will be located will be provided, together with the general purpose of the project and information about the contest. The major point of the project will discuss the school curriculum of Massachusetts that sets the expectations of what students will learn from the exhibit

Multiple-Goal Heuristic Search

This paper presents a new framework for anytime heuristic search where the task is to achieve as many goals as possible within the allocated resources. We show the inadequacy of traditional distance-estimation heuristics for tasks of this type and present alternative heuristics that are more appropriate for multiple-goal search. In particular, we introduce the marginal-utility heuristic, which estimates the cost and the benefit of exploring a subtree below a search node. We developed two methods for online learning of the marginal-utility heuristic. One is based on local similarity of the partial marginal utility of sibling nodes, and the other generalizes marginal-utility over the state feature space. We apply our adaptive and non-adaptive multiple-goal search algorithms to several problems, including focused crawling, and show their superiority over existing methods

Mobile prototyping platforms for remote engineering applications

This paper describes a low-cost mobile communication platform as a universal rapid-prototyping system, which is based on the Quadrocopter concept. At the Integrated Hardware and Software Systems Group at the Ilmenau University of Technology these mobile platforms are used to motivate bachelor and master students to study Computer Engineering sciences. This could be done by increasing their interest in technical issues, using this platform as integral part of a new ad-hoc lab to demonstrate different aspects in the area of Mobile Communication as well as universal rapid prototyping nodes to investigate different mechanisms for self-organized mobile communication systems within the International Graduate School on Mobile Communications. Beside the three fields of application, the paper describes the current architecture concept of the mobile prototyping platform as well as the chosen control mechanism and the assigned sensor systems to fulfill all the required tasks

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Robot al parque 2006-2012: robótica para niños y jóvenes Colombianos

The Robotics competition "Robot in the Park", since its first release in 2006 is an event that has contributed to educational robotics in Colombia, supporting the teaching and learning in different educational institutions in the country by promoting the development of robotic platforms. This event aims to encourage primary school, high school and college students to work in this area, as well as motivate youngsters to consider engineering as a possible career.Supported by the Faculty of Engineering of the District University Francisco José de Caldas and under the IEEE seal, for seven consecutive years, it has succeeded in conducting this contest, which has become the benchmark for events of this type to bring together college students to participate in the competitions.El concurso de robótica “Robot al parque”, desde su primera versión en el año 2006, es un evento que ha contribuido a la robótica educativa en Colombia, buscando apoyar los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje en las diferentes instituciones educativas del país a través del fomento en el desarrollo de plataformas robóticas. Este evento busca incentivar a estudiantes de primaria, secundaria y universitarios a trabajar en esta área, además de motivar a los más pequeños a considerar la ingeniería como una posible profesión. Con el apoyo institucional de la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas y bajo el sello IEEE, durante siete años consecutivos se ha logrado llevar a cabo este concurso, el cual se ha convertido en un referente para los eventos de este tipo vinculando estudiantes de colegios a participar en las competencias planteadas