Collecting experiences in project-based learning environments is very important for students of almost all subjects. Especially, for engineering students who mostly work in teams later on. The department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (HBRS) in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the so called “project weeks”. Three weeks of a semester are available to do some realworld projects besides the normal lectures . In the last three summer terms since 2011 the organisation of a Lego-robots contest for High School kids was used as a realworld project for the project weeks at HBRS. The university students had to prepare and execute the contest in order to get their credit points for the project. This includes: find an overall motto of the contest, invent and prepare funny and interesting tasks for the robot-parcour, handle money issues, organize the two days of the contest including a welcome-show, meals, do calculation to score the winner team and do the final award ceremony. Preparing the contest provides project-related learning elements as well as engineering and team-development challenging elements. So it enables the students to connect theory and practice and to apply knowledge and skills to solve practical problems. The following article describes how the idea of organizing a robots contest for High School kids made its way to a student project, how the project was organized by the lecturer, how the three project weeks were organized and what feedback was obtained at the end by the students.
Undergraduate students of electrical and mechanical engineering have to learn lots of different subjects like mathematics, computer sciences, microcontrollers, principles of electrical engineering, measurement engineering and others. To achieve a deep understanding and to see the connection between all of these different areas, students need to apply and improve their knowledge on real-world projects Click Here
The department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism provides a project-based learning environment in the so-called “project weeks”. Three weeks of a term are available for projects besides the regular courses . This provides a “project-based” or “problem-based” learning which enables students to connect theory and practice and apply knowledge and skills to solve problems. Creativity and soft skills can be trained. The projects from which the students can choose are artificial ones and real ones.
The overall goal for the students was to organize a contest for High School kids with the following outlines:
•Interested kids (5th to 12th grades) from surrounding High Schools of the university are invited to come for a small fee (expected number of kids were around 200) to build a robot on-the-spot which tries to pass as many tasks of an presented parcour: a rectangular playing field of 2 meter per 4 meter
•It should be a two-day-contest, a so called 24-hours one, and it should take place at the university itself (the date was already fixed with the teachers of the surrounding schools) •Only rule for the contest: one robot should try to pass all tasks with a time line of 2 minutes but no rules for the robot itself. Read More
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