Abstract
This paper presents results of our educational experiments aimed to raise awareness of freshmen engineering and senior high school students on the importance of spatial skills and develop strategies for spatial learning through practice of remote operation and programming robot systems in automated manufacturing labs. In the first experiment senior high school students performed two assignments: (a) design of a multi-robot system for automatic labeling of blocks, and (b) picture puzzle assembly by teleoperating a robot manipulator. Pre-course and post-course paper-and-pencil spatial tests indicated considerable improvement in performing cube rotation tasks. An additional indicator of spatial learning was the substantial reduction of the assembly completion time with training. In the second experiment undergraduate freshmen students majoring in industrial engineering performed an exercise: to program the robot to assemble a structure consisting of blocks of different types in a virtual robotic environment RoboCell. Responses to the questionnaire conducted after the exercise indicated that almost all the students aware on importance of spatial skills for their future profession. Majority of them noted that the exercise effectively presented spatial problems in planning and programming robot systems.
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Verner, I.M., Gamer, S., Shtub, A. (2013). Fostering Students’ Spatial Skills through Practice in Operating and Programming Robotic Cells. In: Kim, JH., Matson, E., Myung, H., Xu, P. (eds) Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications 2012. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_71
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_71
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