Robot as a Service in Information Science & Electronic Engineering Education

This paper reports the newly designed programming course developed and taught at Zhejiang University for a freshman class majoring in information science and electronic engineering, and disseminated to many other universities, to address the enrollment crisis as reported by ACM Curriculum Committee Review Task Force. The course teaches the basic information science and electronic engineering concepts and gives the students practical programming experience through robotics programming. The initial curriculum and the ongoing improvement of the course are presented. The course started with its experiment environment using ASU Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Environment (VIPLE). The environment supports a variety of platforms, including open architecture-based robots, such as Intel robots, PCDuino robots, vendor-specific robots, such as Lego EV3, as well as simulated robots, such as Web simulated robots in HTML5 and Unity-based 3D robots.