Design of Autonomous Mobile Robots and Robotic Curriculum for Stem Education at Secondary School Level

Lim, Zhi Zhang (2016) Design of Autonomous Mobile Robots and Robotic Curriculum for Stem Education at Secondary School Level. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Based on research by UNESCO, many countries are concerned about the apparent decline in interest of enrolment of young people especially young women, in engineering, science and technology field. The report has stated that this could have a serious effect on developing country such as our country, Malaysia. UNESCO point out that actions need to be taken to increase the public awareness and understanding toward science and engineering field. Other than that, this report also focus on transforming engineering education, curriculum and teaching methods. This is because UNESCO hope the developing country adapt these teaching methods to emphasize the relevance to solve this problem. Therefore, a simple robot along with a set of curriculum is created to improve the public awareness and to instil interest among secondary school students in Malaysia. This robot is designed with cost in mind as the market is saturated with less affordable similar products. What make this robot unique is that it is designed and created in such a way that the user can reproduce the same robot with minimal cost. The main frame or body of this robot is printed out by 3D printing technology. This educational robot is equipped with two wheel as its main actuators and a microcontroller as the brain. Other than that, additional sockets are placed on top of the robot so that the user can plug any sensor, motor, LEDs, or any other simple electronics modules to perform their preferred function. The user can learn basic as well as advance coding that are based on the popular C++ programming language when they program this robot. Apart from that, a robotic curriculum was planned. The workshop include a presentation by the author, a sets of notes, and hands on participation of the participants. The participants were given a sets of notes which included the working principles of basic electronics component and sets of codes. The participants will have to assemble the robot, learn basic electronics and code, and lastly to program the robot with higher level function such as line following. A simple workshop is conducted using this robot. Two groups of secondary school student with a total number of 23 has participated in this simple robotics workshop. Out of the 23 students, 13 of them are male and 10 of them are female. Major of the participants are Form 4 students. A simple survey is done before and after the workshop for the purpose of information gathering regarding the perception in science and technology of these students. It was found that in general, the student have an increase of interest in STEM. From the analysis, overall female students are more receptive toward this course compare to male students with 6.1% increase compare to 0.77% decrease in interest in engineering related course.