Conceptualising Educational Approaches in Introductory Robotics

This paper considers ‘Introduction to Engineering Design–Mobile Robotics,’ a first year course in the undergraduate engineering programme at Trinity College. A highlight of the course is a team-based semester-long project in which students design and build fire-fighting robots and participate in the international robot competition. Course contents, hands-on learning experiences, and assessment methods are described. Course assessment and evaluation showed that it exposed first-year students to practical and philosophical dimensions of engineering design, successfully addressed many basic ABET outcomes, and elicited a positive student reaction.