Goals:

This project aims to prepare undergraduate students for the contemporary robotics field and for the graduate studies by developing a laboratory-based competition-driven two-semester robotics curriculum. The undergraduate learning experience will be enhanced through college and high school level peer mentoring activities with the joint efforts of the Departments of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) by developing a new outreach model to attract underrepresented groups to the engineering fields.

Objectives

The objectives of this project can be itemized as follows:   

• Develop multidisciplinary robotics projects that have practical importance by participating in the IEEE Region 5 student robotics competition,   
• Through lectures based on the robotics competition projects, equip students with contemporary knowledge,   
• Through projects done in laboratories, increase the true hands-on student learning  experience and enhance their conceptual understanding,   
• Through multidisciplinary robotics projects, Increase students’ ability, competency and teamwork skills on dealing with real-life engineering problems,  
• Apply multidisciplinary active learning components to robotics education during course  module development,   
• Achieve learning objectives for students with weaker science and mathematics background in an interdisciplinary course through hands-on interactive laboratory based approach,   
• Investigate the effect of educational factors used in this project in terms of student learning, 
• Integrate  college  and  high-school  level  peer-mentoring  activities  to  attract  underrepresented students to engineering fields. Read more