Keywords

1 Introduction and General Idea

The maker movement amazes ordinary people around the world by showing creativity of enthusiasts who build gadgets for fun. It might seem childish from the first glance but when one thinks of an affordable 3D-printer as being the result of such work the point might switch to potential technological breakthroughs hiding in the passionate community.

Vast potential of the growing maker culture could benefit the whole society, but some steps are needed to be taken before the quantity becomes quality. While digital fabrication laboratories grow in numbers as fast as the maker movement itself as they provide the actual means for the artists, it is also important not to forget that knowledge is as important as creativity when we speak about technology.

Common technical education is not very responsive to the cutting edge results, so it might take time to import the best practices of the maker movement and possibilities of digital fabrication to prepare even better engineers. This paper presents another step towards this goal.

The paper concentrates on the very early results (this text was prepared while still in the camp and concluded within several days after it finished) of a summer camp organized by a group of educators near Moscow, Russia in July 2016. The prior successful experience of organizing technically oriented education activities using competitive approach [1] was employed as the basis for the camp’s idea. The camp itself could be described as a mix of introduction lectures, uncommon after school activity environment, digital fabrication equipment, robotic competition and intensive schedule.

While robotic competition puts tasks for participants and motivates to win the friendly design race, tutors and teachers are there to help learn during this process. Most of the learning is therefore hidden when seen from the point of the common “lesson-like” school approach.

The result of the camp – a unique robotic project, is achieved through practical work and cooperation between the participants themselves and the “transparent” educational staff.

2 Student Participants

The authors belong to a group of educators who proposed the initial idea and worked on the core aspects of the educational programme for the camp [2, 3]. This work was then adapted to the needs of the universities interested in finding better prospective students among the schoolchildren and teenagers.

The result of the joint effort was a selection process for secondary school students having another 1 or 2 years before entering a university. The selection step for the camp was regulated by universities and was carried out in the form of mathematics/physics/programming written competition, which is common as part of admission process to many higher education institutions.

The typical written competition attracted around 500 participants. 60 of them were selected upon their results. Most of the selected students being well educated in mathematics, physics and programming didn’t have prior experience in robotics or any engineering practical work.

The author group was responsible for the camp’s general educational framework (lectures, practical know-hows, guidance) and for competition organization (preparation of the rules, referees and competition conduction).

3 Schedule

The camp took place in an ordinary summer vacation centre for children. The already well established means of the centre were used to do the basic day-to-day planning. The centre provided meals, sports and recreational activities.

The camp duration of 14 days was also the result of a predefined and non-flexible duration of the summer vacation centre’s typical session. The given time was then divided into 3 periods: “arrival and getting acquainted”, “qualification phase” and “competition phase”. The first period is self-explaining, as most of the participants didn’t know each other before. The last two will be explained later. At this time one can think of the qualification phase as of a more guided educational programme and the competition phase to be more of a DIY (do-it-yourself) style when guidance is very limited to provoke cooperation within the participants’ community.

4 Means and Equipment

The equipment used during the camp is presented in Fig. 1: 1 - laser cutter; 2 - 3D-printers; 3 - drilling machines; 4 - soldering equipment, oscilloscope, signal generator, magnetometer; 5 - plastic bending machine; 6 - a starting kit given to each teams’ disposal on day 3.

Fig. 1.
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The equipment.

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The standard starting kit for each team contained such components for robot building as: 2 geared motors for movement, 2 cheap actuators, 2 wheels, 1 caster wheel, a number of switches and buttons for robot’s remote control, 1 power supply (5 V and 12 V output), a terminal block, 2 Arduino boards, a motor driver board, a relay board, 3 servo motors, a number of distance and line sensors.

Other materials were common to all teams. For example, for laser cutting there were plywood, acrylic glass, cardboard and fibreboard (orgalite).

Teams were not allowed to use any other materials (besides those available in the workshop), nor were they allowed to add components to the standard starting kit. If they ended up with a burned Arduino board they were not given a spare one.

5 The Competition

Robotic competition is the core of the presented educational approach. It motivates students to learn by themselves more than in any other environment. It proves to be true for long-term courses [4] based on such competitions as Eurobot and also for such intensive study short-term courses [5] as the camp being described.

The “qualification” phase of the competition was introduced to fill in the gaps of practical engineering knowledge for most of the participants. This phase was guided by the experienced teachers and 6 tasks of different difficulty were completed one by one in no special order by the students. Teams are free to rebuild and redesign their robots when passing qualification tasks. Work on the tasks in this phase “prepared” the participants for the second “do-it-yourself” competition phase.

In the end of the qualification phase the ratings are used to put teams on a match table for the competition phase. While most of the tasks looked same in competition the robots’ mechanics had to be adapted and changed to be able to solve all of the tasks during a timed match. Competition phase’s tasks are solved by a single robot controlled with a remote.

The playing field used in the camp’s competition phase is shown in Fig. 2 (qualification setup on the left, competition setup on the right).

Fig. 2.
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The playing field for the qualification phase.

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Finally the rating is composed of points for qualification, points from the jury and points for winning play-off matches in the competition.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Examples of robots built during the camp.

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6 Conclusion

The paper summarizes the authors’ experience in conducting an intensive robotics education summer camp based on using CNC machines for building a robot in a team for competitions.

The results of the educational programme are outstanding as all of the participants, mostly having no prior experience in robot building, succeeded in 2 weeks time to finish and present a unique robotic project able to solve qualification and competition tasks (for 4 out of 15 resulting robots see Fig. 3).

The teaching experience gained during the camp proves the idea of merging digital fabrication and robotics competition to give enormous possibilities for educators to teach and for participants to learn. Thus the work is actually a proof of well-established approach to technical, engineering education.

Further analysis and precisions of the educational programme itself are planned to be published as well. Authors also plan to integrate previous work [6] in future programmes for even better results.