As part of a winter exchange program, Artisan’s Asylum hosted students from Incheon and Kyungmin Universities in South Korea to each partake in an immersive Boston-area design experience where they toured schools, visited companies, and learned more about American design and engineering processes.
Working with three other instructors, I created and ran week-long workshops to give students hands-on exposure to design, robotics, and fabrication.
Create an immersive week-long workshop that teaches the design thinking process to Korean students, and exposes them to robotics, fabrication, and programming.
Using robotics as a medium to teach the design thinking process, we challenged students to design a model environment and program a robot to accomplish tasks within it.
We challenged the students to program a robot to solve a difficult problem that a human shouldn’t do. Over the course of the workshop, teams of students built models simulating real-world environments, and programmed Sphero EDU robots to navigate through the models, identify tasks, and solve them. On the final day of the bootcamp, each team presented their final projects to a panel of judges.
By the end of the week, students had learned about programming, robotics, fabrication, and design by applying new skills in the context of the design challenge.
Although robotics was the focus of the workshop, our main goal was to give these students exposure to design thinking and product development workflows in the real world. At our curriculum’s core was the design-thinking process, and students learned how to scope solutions, iterate through prototypes, and present value propositions.
Throughout the workshop, we helped students understand the advantages and disadvantages of robotics. They researched common robotics applications and came up with compelling ideas as to how robots could solve challenges not suitable for humans. These conversations guided their project ideas so they could come up with projects interesting to them and applicable to the real world.
We introduced our students to the Sphero RVR platform and the Sphero EDU program, and challenged students to figure out how to control their robots and get them to sense and respond to their environment in different ways. Students would use these platforms for the final design challenge.
Teams of students selected the robot applications they wanted to tackle, and set out building environments reflective of the real-world use cases. They sketched out workflows determining how the Sphero RVR should behave and respond within each environment, matching the robots’ capabilities to the needs of their mock application.
Each team was also responsible for building their own environments, so they learned and practiced various fabrication techniques to achieve intended effects.
Each team built their environment and programmed their robots in tandem. Both the program and the environment evolved together as students tackled ways to overcome issues both in their programming and in their environment. In the example to the right, students tested different ways of compensating for the vehicle’s inaccurate odometry on uneven surfaces.
At the end of the week, each team gave a presentation to a panel of judges about why having robots in their selected environment would be valuable, and shared the goals, design hurdles, and insights they encountered over the course of the project. Finally, they put their robots to the test and showed the judges what their robot was capable of.
One of our big challenges was designing a learning experience transcending the language barrier we had with the students. Many of the students in the program had minimal English proficiency but wanted to learn more. Most of our lessons focused on hands-on and object-based teaching strategies, demonstrating concepts physically and using key phrases to connect the dots. At the end of the week, groups of students gave their final presentations and demos in full English, and we presented what we had learned from them in Korean.