Delivering software engineering education through LEGO robotics

Author

Weissberger, Ira ; Qureshi, A. ; Qureshi, A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Math. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Virginia´s Coll. at Wise, Wise, VA, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

22-24 Aug. 2014

Firstpage

169

Lastpage

176

Abstract

The number of software engineering jobs is expected to grow faster than all other jobs over the next decade. STEM education is an important initiative to encourage young students to develop the skills they require to succeed in these positions. The First Lego League sponsors annual tournaments in which students must build and program a robot to accomplish various tasks in order to score points. Previously, the students had not used any process or documentation when developing the programs to run on the robot. This competition provides an opportunity to instruct the students in the benefits of using a formalized process that is essential in many software engineering projects commonly encountered in industry.

Keywords

computer science education; robot programming; software engineering; First Lego League; LEGO robotics; STEM education; formalized process; program development; robot building; robot programming; skills development; software engineering education; software engineering projects; student instruction; Computers; Education; Encoding; Robots; Rotation measurement; Software; Configuration Management; STEM Education; Software Design; Software Engineering; Software Requirements; Software Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2014 9th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Vancouver, BC

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-2949-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCSE.2014.6926449

Filename

6926449