Moving Towards A More Systems Approach In A Robotics Based Introductory Engineering Course At Mount Holyoke College

Introducing engineering principles and practices to students in an all-female liberal arts institution is a challenging task. This paper documents the challenges and progress made in developing and teaching a robotics based introductory engineering course at Mount Holyoke College. The course was offered for the first time in Spring '04 and, after modifications, was offered again in Fall '04. Though the hands-on design experience of building an autonomous robot proved successful in the first version of the course, we found that the time and frustration involved in programming autonomous robots prevented students from being exposed to a wider array of engineering problems and skills. Through the development of wireless communication and tele-operation laboratory modules, we hope to shift the focus away from the programming complexities involved in an autonomous robot competition and towards the robotic system itself, allowing students to more fundamentally explore both component and system issues. At the component level, students in the second course are more substantively exposed to electronics and modeling while the coupling of the new laboratory modules with novel teaching pedagogies provides an opportunity to explicitly address systems issues such as component integration, communication, and sensor networks. As motivating female engineers is our guiding priority, it is the goal of this course to combine the strengths of a hands-on design course with a rigorous introduction to necessary tools, intuitions, and critical thinking that will help enable the student to grapple with many different engineering problems both in academia and the real world.