Possible Use of Robots in the CS Curriculum at RIT

ABSTRACT

The Handy Board is a hand-held, battery-powered microcontroller board ideal for personal and educational robotics projects. Based on the Motorola 68C11 microprocessor, the Handy Board includes 32K of batter-backed static RAM, outputs for four DC motors, inputs for a variety of sensors (photo, infra-red, magnetic, etc.), and a 16x2 character LCD screen. The Handy Board runs Interactive C, a cross-platform, multi-tasking version of the C programming language.

I have put together a robot based on the Handy Board technology, and will give a presentation which will include the following topics:

• An introductory talk about the Handy Board:
  • What is Handy Board? -- A technical description.
  • Ideas behind the creation of the Handy Board.
  • Handy Board's capabilities.
• A demonstration of a Handy Board robot (seeing is believing!)
• Discussion about the design of the robot:
  • Choices which I had to make while putting the robot together,
  • Problems which I faced, and obstacles which had to overcome.
  • Ideas on other possible implementations (time vs. quality).
• And finally, a discussion on how we can put Handy Board-like robots to use in the Computer Science curriculum at RIT:
  • Why Handy Board?!
  • Theory vs. hands-on.
  • Possible topics of Computer Science which can be emphasized with help of robots (in particular -- Handy Board robots).
  • Candidate CS courses for robot projects.
  • What prerequisites do RIT Computer Science students need to take in order to work with the Handy Board robots?
  • Handy Board projects: How much time and effort is needed for the faculty to create the projects, and for the students -- to complete them.

My presentation is designed to introduce the idea of use of robots in our Computer Science curriculum, develop basic concepts behind the idea, and provoke further interest from the side of faculty to explore this idea in a greater depth.

References
Colloquia Series page.