University laboratories deliver unique hands-on experimentation opportunities for STEM students, but often lack state-of-the-art equipment and provide limited access to their equipment. The University of Texas Cloud Laboratory (CLAB) provides remote access to cutting-edge series elastic actuators for student experimentation regarding…

Organizations are keenly interested in employees trained in business analysis and robotic process automation. This is because those methods are growing in demand for improving efficiency in business processes. Business students exiting college must understand how to map out business processes and implement automation fundamentals to be competitive…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) entered the general lexicon in the United States within the last ten years. Both Presidents Obama and Trump emphasized STEM education as a priority for the United States because the number of college graduates with STEM degrees is perceived as an important factor contributing to the global…

COVID-19 presented a challenge to the traditional methods of teaching programming and robotics in a secondary school environment. When campuses were closed around the world in the spring of 2020, it was not possible for students to access the computer labs nor the robotics equipment that was traditionally used to facilitate the instruction of…

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop in its sophistication and integration into contemporary society, how well are educators preparing students to navigate this reality? Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is harnessing the expertise of faculty members across campus to create innovative curricular offerings that expose students,…

This article describes an introductory computational thinking (CT) lesson that was implemented into five educational technology classes at a large university in the southern United States. A total of 88 undergraduate and graduate students participated in the lesson. The project was the result of a collaboration between education faculty and a…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimated that approximately 9% of current jobs within OECD member states are threatened with automation and digitalization--all significant successes and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer science. With such global changes and forecasts, in the labor…

In the training of future informatics teachers the students obtain experience with different methods of programming. As well, the students become familiar with programming by using the robotic system Lego Mindstorms. However, the small number of Lego systems available is a limiting factor for the teaching process. Use of virtual robotic…

Several college majors, outside of computer science, require students to learn computer programming. Many students have difficulty getting through the programming sequence and ultimately change majors or drop out of college. To deal with this problem, active learning techniques were developed and implemented in a freshman programming logic and…

The interdisciplinary nature of robotics allows mobile robots to be used successfully in a broad range of courses at the postgraduate level and in Ph.D. research. Practical industrial-like mobile robotic demonstrations encourage students and increase their motivation by providing them with learning benefits not achieved with traditional…

This paper describes the integration of robotics education into an undergraduate Computer Science curriculum. The proposed approach delivers mobile robotics as well as covering the closely related field of Computer Vision and is directly linked to the research conducted at the authors' institution. The paper describes the most relevant details of…

Teaching computer programming to novices is a difficult task due to the complex nature of the subject, as negative stereotypes are associated with programming and because introductory programming courses often fail to encourage student understanding. This Protocol outlines the plan that is to be followed in order to investigate the effectiveness…

Educational robotics proposes the use of robots as a teaching resource that enables inexperienced students to approach topics in fields unrelated to robotics. In recent years, these activities have grown substantially in elementary and secondary school classrooms and also in outreach experiences to interest students in science, technology,…

This paper describes a multidisciplinary teaching program, designed to provide students with the broad knowledge and skills required to practice product development in robotics and mechatronics. The curriculum was designed to prepare students for the senior capstone design project, in which they design and build a working mechatronic/robotic…

This paper describes a new approach for a course and laboratory designed to allow students to develop low-cost prototypes of robotic and other embedded devices that feature Internet connectivity, I/O, networking, a real-time operating system (RTOS), and object-oriented C/C++. The application programming interface (API) libraries provided permit…