Colias: towards an affordable mobile robot for education in developing countries

Educational robotics can play a key role in addressing some of the important challenges faced by higher education in developing countries. One of the major obstacles preventing a wider adoption of initiatives involving educational robotics in these parts of the world is a lack of robot platforms which would be affordable for the local educational institutions. In this paper, we present our inexpensive mobile robot platform Colias and assess its potential for education in developing countries. To this end, we describe hardware and software components of the robot, assess its suitability for education and discuss the missing features which will need to be developed to turn Colias into a fully featured educational platform. The presented robot is one of the key components of our current efforts in popularising educational robotics at African universities

A semi-autonomous mobile robot for education and research

AbstractThis paper presents the development, implementation, and testing of a semi-autonomous robotic platform, which may potentially be used for educational and research purposes. Educational purposes include: teaching the student how to design a stable electromechanical platform, exploring different types of sensors to navigate around any obstacles, interfacing different electronic components to a microcontroller, and demonstrating how to program the microcontroller chip in order to control a robotic platform. Research purposes include: developing and investigating the performance of different control algorithms to achieve behaviour analysis and obstacles avoidance. A modular hardware design is implemented using I2C bus to interface different sensors and motor drivers to the ATMEL microcontroller chip (AVR ATmega32). The hardware is integrated in one application board as embedded system design. The software is developed using C-compiler (ImageCraft) and a top-down approach is adopted to design different software modules. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the potential of the developed hardware and software modules

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

”Hide and Tweet”: A game to teach schoolchildren about spatial technologies

As part of the Geotechnology research team at NUI Maynooth we were involved in the preparation and running of various activities in the Summer School on Computer Science for school children aged between 12 to 18 years old. Since year 2009 we have been constantly developing, testing, and deploying some geospatial software applications which were used by the children for activities in the summer school programme. The high level goal of this development was to help school children become more familiar GPS devices and computerbased Location-based services (LBS) technologies which are now playing such a crucial role in today’s Internet connected society. The software applications were used as part of games and tasks for the children. In our paper we shall describe how these games have evolve during these years, the educational aspects and benefits of the game and how both the software components and devices were developed. Overall, children participating in the summerschool provided their comments in the form of a survey. They felt that there were now more aware about possibilities in geoinformatics available with “ordinary off the shelf devices”. Different issues related with webbased maps (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, etc) were introduced and we explained the differences between them. Most importantly in case of geo-technologies we felt that the activities helped the children become aware that that computing and positioning happens everywhere and is not tied with the desk and the desktop computer.We summarise our experiences gained in these last three years and discuss the educational gains of this type of game-based approach to location-based technologies to schoolchildren. All of our software is developed using free and open-source components meaning that it can be deployed by any school or educational facility with minimum cost. A smartphone-based version of the software has also been developed

A Meta-model for Developing Simulation Games in Higher Education and Professional Development Training

Games and simulations can be powerful educational tools for higher education and professional development training. At the same time, the labor and technical costs of development is sufficiently high that simulation games tend to be rather static and course or program specific. The main contribution of this paper is an effort to define a new meta-model for educational simulation games that is transferable to a broad range of disciplines and technical training fields. A meta-model provides a formal structure upon which similar categories of game play components are tied to specific learning objectives and easily updatable knowledge content while offering an infinite combination of playing experiences and maintaining consistent pedagogical standards. To illustrate, this paper draws from the application of our meta-model as used in developing a simulation game for software engineering education. Preliminary validation results are presented, in which the meta-model is used as a foundation in the architecture for a game development platform

Pengembangan Aplikasi Edukasi Kuis Bahasa Arab sebagai Alternatif Media Belajar Siswa Kelas I Madrasah Ibtidaiyah

Vocabulary is one of the most critical linguistic components that Arabic as a foreign language learners must master. Previous studies discovered that it was accurate that first-grade students struggled to recognize and master Arabic vocabularies since the learning process mainly consisted of lectures and homework. Students need external help or stimulation to increase their comprehension of Arabic. Educational games may encourage first-grade students since they like to play and explore electronic devices such as androids, laptops, and so on. This study aims to develop an educational application that contains acceptable Arabic vocabulary content for first grade (elementary school) students. The research employed the ADDIE (Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation) paradigm of research and development. This study involves developing an educational application called "Arabic Quiz", which utilizes the Articulate Storyline 360 software. According to feasibility tests conducted by a media expert, a material expert, and prospective consumers, this application has an "excellent" category. The program is suited for use as an alternative learning media for first-grade students

Pengembangan Aplikasi Edukasi Kuis Bahasa Arab sebagai Alternatif Media Belajar Siswa Kelas I Madrasah Ibtidaiyah

Vocabulary is one of the most critical linguistic components that Arabic as a foreign language learners must master. Previous studies discovered that it was accurate that first-grade students struggled to recognize and master Arabic vocabularies since the learning process mainly consisted of lectures and homework. Students need external help or stimulation to increase their comprehension of Arabic. Educational games may encourage first-grade students since they like to play and explore electronic devices such as androids, laptops, and so on. This study aims to develop an educational application that contains acceptable Arabic vocabulary content for first grade (elementary school) students. The research employed the ADDIE (Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation) paradigm of research and development. This study involves developing an educational application called "Arabic Quiz", which utilizes the Articulate Storyline 360 software. According to feasibility tests conducted by a media expert, a material expert, and prospective consumers, this application has an "excellent" category. The program is suited for use as an alternative learning media for first-grade students

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution