Education Innovation: LEGO MindStorms - Cost-Effectively Expanding CS Students' Horizons and Enthusiasm Outside the (Desktop) Box

Villanova University, Villanova PA

Investigators

Abstract

0306096 Frank Klassner Villanova University Education Innovation: LEGO MindStorms - Cost-Effectively Expanding CS students' Horizons and Enthusiasm Outside the (Desktop) Box $490,000 This project involves investigators from three institutions - Villanova University, University of Mississippi, and Alma College - and is a follow up of a Proof of Concept grant, DUE-0088884, awarded by the DUE Division of NSF. The current project involves four activities: developing a set of 40 assignments and laboratory exercises that use LEGO MindStorms robot kits to promote active student learning across the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001) guidelines; identifying and maintaining software technology that is needed to make the MindStorms platform support the range of assignments developed; motivating students' interest in, understanding of, and application of advanced computer science research results through exploration with the MindStorms platform; and measuring the pedagogical efficacy of the MindStorms platform. In part, this project was motivated by a survey of research efforts and employment opportunities in CISE fields over the past five years that showed several trends that may have serious implications for the traditional undergraduate computer science curriculum design - that is, greater emphasis on mobile networking, ubiquitous computing, large-scale networks, real time systems, agent architectures, embedded signal analysis systems in robotics and information retrieval systems, distributed system design, and world-wide-web language design in the research community, in part because of the explosion in network capabilities on the WWW. Employment opportunities for computer science BS graduates are increasingly requiring competence in distributed computing solutions and embedded programming solutions within the greater context of the World Wide Web. This institution's experience with hands-on robotics projects, in an NSF CCLI proof-of-concept grant, indicated that undergraduate students' motivation to learn new computing principles increases significantly when they apply those principles to constructing robots and designing problem-solving control code for their creations. However, scarcity of educational materials available to implement this approach is a deterrent to its pursuit. This project identifies seven out of the fourteen knowledge areas in the CC2001that might be pedagogically enhanced through robotics-oriented projects: Programming Fundamentals, Algorithms and Complexity, Programming Languages, Architecture, Operating Systems, Intelligent Systems, and Net-Centric Computing. All of the areas targeted in this project contain material that the committee has designated as 'core' topics. Thus, advanced and elective courses in a CC2001-based curriculum can seamlessly take advantage of students' experiences in the core topics when exploring advanced research results in the context of MindStorms robotics. The materials developed by this project will be disseminated both through the WWW and workshops.