Building Robots to Learn Design and Engineering

Abstract

Each year for the past three years, over one hundred and fifty undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have participated in the “LEGO Robot Design Competition,” an experimental class based on the central activity of building a fully functional autonomous robot. This is an unprecedented number for a purely voluntary course, held over the university’s month-long break between semesters. The popular course immerses students in an intensive, hands-on design experience. Working in teams of two to four, students are introduced to key ideas in engineering and technology: electronic hardware, software design, mechanical design, control theory, and systems integration. More important, the course gives students the opportunity to design, to take their own ideas from initial conception to implementation, debugging, and application. In addition, the final contest pushes students to confront real-world engineering issues of performance, reliability, and resource allocation. The pedagogical approach taken by the Robot Design class has roots in the constructionist theories of learning developed by Seymour Papert[4]. According to constructionism, the acquisition of knowledge,