Fire-fighting robot contest: Interdisciplinary design curricula in college and high school

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2002 by Verner, Igor M, Ahlgren, David J

An Educational Brief

ABSTRAcT

This paper describes the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest and contest-related curricular developments at the college level and the high school level. We discuss the learning processes related to team-based robot design projects and present findings obtained from the contest surveys, pertaining to learning subjects, activities and motivation of the participants.

I. INTRODUCTION

In the past two decades there has been intensive debate about expanding professional practice in engineering education by exposing students to design problems that pose uncertain, unique, and conflicted situations. Educators believe that by tackling such problems students acquire skills of "professional artistry" [15], which may be associated with the engineering Criterion 3 outcomes (a-k) published by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) [5].

Pugh [14] presented a methodical analysis of engineering practice and developed a model of the product design process. This consists of the following stages: market specification, conceptual design, detailed design, manufacture, and sales. The design core is complemented by iterations within and between stages. The Pugh model presents design as a process that integrates knowledge from different science and engineering disciplines, different types of design activities, various aspects of the design process, and individual experiences into collective teamwork. The model and detailed specifications of the design process provide a suitable framework for the robot design projects described below.

Robot contests present many fruitful ideas for design projects pursued by students in universities, colleges and schools. The contests, including those surveyed in [12, 17], offer engineering assignments of different levels, from a high-school competition FIRST [8] to advanced research programs such as the robotic soccer initiative RoboCup [4]. The Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest (TCF2HRC) [1, 2,13] poses a challenging problem that has attracted university professors and students, school pupils, and hobbyists, i.e., to design robots that can navigate autonomously through a maze, find a lit candle, and extinguish the flame in minimum time. The TCF2HRC has increased in popularity around the world, and regional fire-fighting contests have been held in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Seattle, Calgary, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv. The contest has also provided a theme for introducing under-represented female and minority high-school students to engineering [31, and it has stimulated curricular developments both at university and high-school levels.

This paper presents the educational benefits of the TCF^sup 2^HRC, focusing on how the contest assignment can be integrated in the college curriculum and how it can serve as a theme for high-school graduation projects. Given the increasing popularity of robotic competitions [17] and particularly the TCF^sup 2^HRC in engineering education, we discuss how the contest has been integrated into the curriculum, and how we carried out an assessment of contestrelated learning outcomes.

II.. EDUCATION THROUGH INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGN

This section presents our understanding the concepts of constructionism and interdisciplinary design, which underlie education through team-based robot design projects. Following the concept of constructionism [6], learning processes happen most effectively when a learner is involved in the creation of external and sharable artifacts and uses them as "objects to think with" in order to explore, embody, and share ideas related to the topic of inquiry.

A freshman robot design course based on the constructionist approach is presented in [10]. The course revolved around challenging robotic tasks, team projects and competitions. Instructional methods of "lectures and recitation were subordinated to the practical work of getting the robots built and debugged".

Recent developments in robotics technology and new constructive textbooks such as [9] have opened up opportunities for creative robot design projects to people with limited engineering background, particularly to high school students. Our study [16] indicated that curricula developed by college and high school teams participating in the fire-fighting robot contest follow the constructionist approach. The contest assignment threads knowledge and skills through various disciplines learned in the course and leads to the common hierarchy of interdisciplinary design activities:

1. Practice in performing the contest assignments by means of the robot.

2. Implementation of sensing, control and communication functions for the robot system.

3. Design of electrical, mechanical, computer and other components for constructing the robot.

4. Knowledge acquisition in background technology and science subjects.

In the following sections of the paper we argue that through these interdisciplinary design activities, students inherently realize several of the engineering Criterion 3 outcomes (a-k). Our discussion is related primarily to outcome (c), "An ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs," and outcome (d), "An ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams" [2].