Concurrent Software Engineering and Robotics Education

This paper presents a new, multidisciplinary robotics programming course, reports initial results, and describes subsequent improvements. With equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics, the course teaches students how software engineering applies to robotics. Students learn independently and interactively and gain hands-on experience by implementing robotics algorithms on a real robot. To understand the effects of the course, we conducted an exit and an 8-month survey and measured software quality of the students' solutions. The analysis shows that the hands-on experience helped everyone learn and retain robotics well, but the students' knowledge gain in software engineering depended on their prior programming knowledge. Based on these findings, we propose improvements to the course. Lastly, we reflect our experience on andragogy, minimalism, and interactive learning.