Abstract
Improving the retention of first-year college students has been the focus of many engineering programs. Often, students declare an engineering major without having an understanding of what that major entails or what their career goals are. This lack of understanding combined with the absence of proper mentoring results in a large percentage of students who either switch to other majors or drop out of college without receiving a degree. To lessen the attrition rate among first-year engineering majors, the common initiative that has been adopted by many engineering programs is to offer an introductory-level engineering course. The main educational objective of these courses is to help students gain a better understanding of the engineering field and what engineers do. At the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, located in the South Central Region of USA, we developed and introduced a robot project in the curriculum of our introductory course for first-year electrical engineering majors. Using the Pololu 3pi mobile robot, the project allows students to experience a real-world engineering problem. To prepare students for the robot project, we used the experiential learning model that aimed at engaging students in hands-on learning experiences consisting of robot navigation examples. Students gained a glimpse into the different technical subjects within the electrical engineering field through their experience working with the robots. Data collected over several semesters showed that educational robots contribute to keeping first-year students in the program.
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Notes
- 1.
UTRGV is located in the South Central Region of USA.
- 2.
The course numbering at UTRGV consists of four letters followed by four digits. The letters indicate the subject (e.g., ELEE indicates electrical engineering and CSCI indicates computer science). The first digit of the course number indicates the class year, and the second digit indicates the number of credit hours.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following graduate students for their help in the laboratory: Jose Escobar, David Flores, Edgar Gil, Eric Gonzalez, Hugo Herrera, Everardo Ibarra, Christopher Martin, and Hector Trevino.
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Ben Ghalia, M. (2019). Using Robots to Introduce First-Year College Students to the Field of Electrical Engineering. In: Daniela, L. (eds) Smart Learning with Educational Robotics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19913-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19913-5_12
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