Robotics

To educate more engineers pupils may need some encouragement. Robotics seem a sensible choice.

Virtual robotics

A combination of LEGO Digital Designer and Lego Mindstorms could allow to design and program virtual robots.

Robotics Mentoring

A limited number of actual hardware robots could create motivation (through "artificial" scarcity) for pupils to be allowed to work with the hardware robots. Robot games like Robot Odyssey [1] could be used as qualification and for mentoring purposes: Pupils are motivated to solve the game as qualification, as entertainment and because a mentor offers support and encouragement in solving the puzzles in the game. A mentor would probably need guidance in how to help a pupil to solve puzzles him - or herself, not through hints given by the mentor. A Journal entry stating that the game had been solved could be required to run the software that allowed to program actual robots.

References

• ^  Robot Odyssey - A 1984 TRS-80 Color Computer robot programming game from The Learning Company (Java Version DroidQuest is free for personal or educational uses)

External links

• Lego Mindstorms, LEGO Digital Designer
• Fischertechnik Robotics
• ASURO - 50 € robot from DLR School Lab (German Wikipedia), English: arexx.com
• CeeBot, ColoBot - Robotics games