Research and Evaluation of Robot Engineering Design Education in Science Leader Training Course

Abstract

The authors held a training course to learn robotics and AI programming with a drone for junior high school students. This course is a part of the children's science and technology human resources development project in Okinawa Prefecture. Initially, this training course was conducted based on the “robots and control” subject of National Institute of Technology, Okinawa College. A lecture was conducted through team training as a practical engineering design education class. The contents of lecture were software training and demonstration of robot system realization. However, implementing a drone autonomous movement program for junior high school students was challenging. For this reason, we devised a method that uses human movements instead of full-autonomous programs (we used color-object following and human following to control the drone, which will be described later). As a result, we established a training course for making a drone control program for junior high school students in 3 to 4 days. This paper describes and evaluates the system used in the abovementioned training course. The evaluation was based on the ARCS model. We present this teaching system as a practical example of engineering design training in primary education.