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Robots Coming to Intro Computer Science Classes

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Jul 13, 2006 06:48 AM
from the my-dog-ate-my-robot dept.
Robotics Education
BlueCup writes "Two colleges are hoping to make computer science courses more attractive by including personal robots with the textbooks. Looking to boost enrollment in introductory computer science classes, Microsoft Corp. is working with Bryn Mawr College and Georgia Tech on developing new ways to bring robotics technology into the classroom. Douglas Blank, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr, said the goal will be to start incorporating the robots in introductory courses at the suburban Philadelphia college next spring. Georgia Tech hopes to start during that term as well. The idea behind the program, Blank said, is to make computer science more hands-on and practical, rather than simply about debugging programs." Update: 07/13 15:52 GMT by T :Professor Blank wrote in with some clarification on one of his statements — read on below.

dougblank writes

"Note to self: when talking to the press, don't use complicated technical jargon, like 'debugging' :) I think what I actually said was 'rather than debug a program to make it give the right answer, the students must debug the program to make the robot behave the way they want it to.'

I think many of you will actually like the hardware, software, and curriculum that we are designing. Check out roboteducation.org/ and pyrorobotics.org. The new version of the software will be based on Pyro, Python Robotics. We think of the hardware as something like an iPod on wheels. The software is also being developed with an open source license. This project is not what many of you guess it might be.

The CS1 and CS2 that we are developing won't be watered down, but also won't be just the standard 'intro to programming, using robots.' It's a complete rethinking of the intro courses."

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  • The Japanese are doing the same (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:51AM (#15711582)
    ... with sex ed classes.

  • Great (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jpaz (512242) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:52AM (#15711584) Homepage
    As if books aren't already expensive enough. I wonder how much a used robot/textbook will cost, as well.
    • Well it is BillGatesbot, so the cost is $50 Billion.

      Why you ask, that was what it costed in 1990 and MS does not sell any for less than they sold it before.

    • Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alamoth (927972) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:25AM (#15711723)
      The Sony AIBO (before it was discontinued) cost $2,000. However, schools are allowed to buy them for educational purposes at a discounted price of ~$1,700. This is a robust platform, and not everyone needs one. As far as personal robots goe, the B.O.E. Educational robots go for $100 ~ $500 depending on quality. The lower end is a little more pricey than your average new textbook.

      • Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Unfortunately I haven't made an account so don't dismiss me for being an AC. I have actually been working with a small college called Canisius in Buffalo and we have already introduced robotics into our lower level classes. Believe it or not, it does help. Students were going nuts with it. I even think we gave Doug the idea for this. If you check out AAAI last year, there was a paper from canisius college about robotics in CS classes. Of course you don't use the Aibo (which I love programming on) for
    • Finally! Georgia Tech has listened to our begging and is finally going to improve the Tech Ratio(TM). Not by admitting more girls (after all, the problem isn't the number of girls at Tech, it is the _quality_), but by making them! How much better can you get?! Discussions were under way to implement a send-your-picture-with-application requirement for the female applicants. After a girl met the academic requirements, a comittee of 15 or so guys would determine if she met the "attractiveness" standards. This

    • Lego Mindstorms (Score:4, Interesting)

      by neonprimetime (528653) on Thursday July 13 2006, @09:43AM (#15712534)
      My undergraduate cs department purchases some Lego Mindstorms [lego.com] off eBay and used them in the intro courses. They don't cost much (couple hundred max), so our tuition didn't go up anything. You got to write programs for them in Java. It was very exciting and sparked lots of interest (everybody wanted to take the class). Although it's not as cool as each student getting an individual robot, it is as close as some of the smaller campuses can get, and it's a great idea!
      • Most of my CS professors just assigned books that would be helpful to have on your professional bookshelf and taught us what they pleased. I have plenty of $80+ books (never a $100 though) that I've never needed for class but have helped out a lot since then. The most important IMHO being my Algorithms textbook.

      • Most of my computer science professors understood the racket that is the textbook industry, or had written so many of their own textbooks they just handed out notes (apparently it's unethical to teach from your own textbook, but not from the notes you used to write the textbook). So they had us buy cheap books that serve as good reference material, if any at all. And actually we did use them quite a bit anyway.

        Maybe the market will find a good robot or two that are common across universities, that or an op

        • Just sounds like a gimmic to me.

          I flirted with Comp Sci a long time before I actually got physical, and took a lot of classes at a lot of different places. I had classes that were too heavy on theory, I had classes that were too heavy on "practical" skills, which usually amounted to "how to use this language/program to do this thing".

          I think, in the long run, a lot of places really don't have the faintest idea what it takes to make a good CS person. It doesn't help that CS covers way too much ground anyway.
            • Ah, CS snobbery from an AC...I mod ACs -4, but I still check 'em when they're under my threshold, which is stupid. Anyway, Turing was deeply interested in practical computing you know, and in his day, there really wasn't enough computer science that it was in any way difficult for one person to study it all. Thank you for making my point though, because, for what I do, there was no other choice for a degree program.

              I know the CS purists sneer at the guys in the trenches, like we should all have gone to ITT

  • Why? (Score:3, Funny)

    by 1u3hr (530656) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:52AM (#15711586)
    Robots Coming to Intro Computer Science Classes

    As teachers or students?



    • Robots Coming to Intro Computer Science Classes

      As teachers or students?

      You mean there's a difference between robots and the people in the CS dept?

  • Da Cheatbot (Score:4, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack (534373) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:54AM (#15711595)
    If only I would've had this lesson before deciding on a career in technology [homestarrunner.com]
  • At Northeastern University I took a course similar to the one in the article except it was related to a program called CenSSIS. It was pretty interesting because it combined ultrasonic technology and programming to work on different projects. The most impressive of which was mapping an object found in jello without cutting into the jello. Though that course was an engineering course and not a computer science course.
  • ...to make computer science more hands-on and practical, rather than simply about debugging programs.

    Kinda like discussing Bronte during Maths to make it "less about numbers", isn't it?

    • No, it's kinda like discussing economics or physics during calculus to make it more practical and show people the real-world applications. Robots are an application of computer science; Bronte is not an application of math, but physics and economics are.

      It's a matter of giving people more practical work, which is both more interesting and easier to learn for some people. I usually find that I learn a language better when I can play with it, and doubly so if I can write something real with it. Having a real piece of hardware that responds to your program is more exciting than just printing messages on a console.

          • If you're programming the robot in assembly then you aren't going to get very far in getting it to do much. Unless your assembly instructions includes MOV A,50, Which moves the arm 50 degrees, then you're going to be pretty limited in what you can get the robot to do. Also, if that's the kind of assembly programming you're doing, then you're not really learning assembly. Despite the fact that we all hated the assembly course, because we had already learned C and Java, and in assembly it takes an hour to w
  • It case anyone hadn't noticed, computer science has very little to do with computers, and nothing whatsoever to do with hardware. I can just imagine the course instructors cackling as the naive students skip inside expecting arrays of sophisticated robots waiting to be programmed:

    "Fools!! Did you really think it would be that interesting? You're mathematicians now!! Now get back to computing runtime complexities for applications you will never have call to write, or understand! *Wwwuu-ttisshh* Bwahahahhahahaaa !!"
  • ...where I study in Stockholm, Sweden. Loads of fun!

  • Coming? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chris Pimlott (16212) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:03AM (#15711644)
    This is hardly cutting edge;
    Case Western Reserver University started a program like this 5 years ago [cwru.edu] using Lego Mindstorms kits, and I'm sure they weren't the first. This is seperate from the higher-level Autonomous Robotics (aka Lego Lab) [cwru.edu] course that's been going on since 1995 [cwru.edu] and is based largely on MIT's 6.270 Autonomous Robot course [mit.edu] that created the Handy Board [wikipedia.org].
  • With only a CS1 and CS2 under my belt, and having programmed in only Java and VBA, I did a project in school that had me programming a self-navigating robot in C. We had a small processor* with a C compiler and a debugger. I soon augmented the debugger with a row of LEDs wired to one of the registers, so I could debug while the thing was driving around and not hooked up to the computer with the debugger. It should just be kept low level enough that students have to solve their own problems. Its a great way

  • Then it's not computer science (Score:3, Insightful)

    by s1axter (988646) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:07AM (#15711657) Homepage
    See the problem is, robotics is not computer science... it's electrical and computer engineering. Just because you want to bring more people to the dicipline doesn't meen you redefine what the dicipline is

    • Re:Then it's not computer science (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alamoth (927972) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:40AM (#15711804)
      Anyone who thinks that Robotics is not Computer Science has never actually worked with a robot. Robots encompass Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science.

      MechE provides the muscles, the bones, the skin, and the structure of the robot.

      CompE provides the nervous system, the veins and arteries, the heart, and the hormones.

      CompSci provides the brain.

      Take any one of these disciplines away and the robot fails.
    • No, you misunderstood... they're actually robotic travelling salesmen. You program them with a turing machine.
    • I always said teaching game programming would be a good way to get students interested and to maintain their interest beyond the classroom. Simple board games can be used to teach data structures and search algorithms. Simple 70's or 80's style arcade games teach real-time methods and basic cooperative multitasking. OOP anyone? The best part is that when the class is over, students are more likely to continue on their own. With a little thought, you can cover most of the CS spectrum using various games.
    • So is it the electrical engineers or computer engineers who program the complex, multi-threaded artificial intelligence applications? I mentored a high school robotics program that participates in the FIRST Robotics competition and I can tell you that the hardware students didn't know or care how to program the robot. They focused on building the robot and the software students focused on programming the behavior of the robot. I'm not saying that there aren't people interested in the hardware and softwar

  • The idea... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pesc (147035) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:11AM (#15711670)
    The idea behind the program, Blank said, is to make computer science more hands-on and practical, rather than simply about debugging programs.

    Or maybe the idea is to make sure that the students have to use windows in order to use the robots. MS wants its OS to be used more for embedded and controller applications and have to do something to stop the students from using those small, open, inexpensive Linux systems.

    Or am I wrong? Could the students use the robots and textbooks without MS tech?

  • All The Cool Kids Are Doing It (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alamoth (927972) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:22AM (#15711713)
    At Lehigh University where I just finished up my B.S. in Computer Engineering I was able to take part in the creation and infusion of a robotics curriculum into our CompSci department. The response was incredibly positive. When we opened up our course catalogues one semester to find that "Real-Time Vision Processing for Autonomous Robots" would be a course offered along with "Mobile Robotics" and "Robocup" we were ecstatic. Artificial Intelligence has always been a big seller in CompSci departments but it has been theoretical. Imagine taking an entry level course on C++ and not being able to write code on a computer. Theory without application has its limits. Robotics brings practical, observable results to the realm of A.I. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the Engineering School invites prospective students to tour the labs. Part of their tour is the CompSci robotics lab. They are privy to demonstrations of work being done with the Sony AIBO and several other robots that were all made in the labs. Needless to say that the biggest thrill for almost all the prospective students (and especially their parents) are the robots. They are simply enthralled by the thought that at our university we have computers that can (to an extent) think for themselves. Computer Science as a college discipline has come to a point where departments that don't incorporate robotics soon will find their enrollment dwindling!
    • Eh, AI can be applied relatively easily with a little bit of work. When I studied AI, my lecturer created a 2D virtual environment, and we had to write agents in LISP which could explore, gather food (for utiles), stave off predators and do it faster than the agents that other people had written, in a variety of scenarios. Good fun.
  • I hate Microsoft as much as the next card carrying slashdot reader but I'm glad they're doing this. I'm sure they have a profit motive of some kind, but this funding scheme can't help but to improve the state of education.

    I have to wonder what kind of robots these are that cost so much money however. Robots like this should cost about $100 -$300 tops.

    • ... can't help but to improve the state of education.

      Depends on whether it's general education or M$ vocational training.

      And don't forget that most of the "funding" is likely to be M$ licenses, pseudo-money that costs M$ nothing. Hardly kudos for that.

      ---

      Keep your options open!

  • We had those in my freshman computer enginnering classes. We had these little Rug Warrior robots that we got to program to do crazy things like navigate a maze, measure the area of a room, etc. They were a great introduction not only to the field, but also to a lot of other concepts such as the C language, pointer, and working with registers and drivers.

    sadly, our Computer Science department is moving in the opposite direction. They recently changed the first language they teach freshman from C++ to Jav

  • Lack of Interest (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jchawk (127686) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:07AM (#15711940) Homepage Journal
    The problem with Computer Science right now is it's not the "hot" field. Most kids going to college are going to college so they can get out and earn a better living then if they didn't go to school...

    The job market for computer science folks is flat right now with respect to new grads... If you don't have 5 years or more experience you are likely to have a difficult time finding a jump off point in the business.

    Honestly I can say I don't help much... It's hard for me to hire grads out of college. They tend to be relatively worthless. They have 0 business experience and can't function without constant supervision. It's easier for me to just go out and hire someone with more experience... Until the job market heats up again and IT people are in demand I think most companies will continue to snipe the best people rather then someone new.

  • Can't you just hear it?

    "Algorithms. Don't talk to me about algorithms."

  • Don't fall for this trick, what are their REAL motives? What will happen if an entire generation of future computer scientists fall pray to human eating/destroying robots? Everyone knows that default programming of any robot includes these very very simple steps:
    1. Find humans.
    2. Kill them all.
    3. Define moment as 3000 milliseconds.
    3. Collect some pretty flowers and enjoy the moment.
    4. Go to 1.
    • Of-course maybe the robots shouldn't have killed ALL the human programmers, because obviously it was a human sympathizer who wrote the above program hoping to CONFUSE the default robot language compiler by introducing an ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERR...

      But another programmer who is not a robot decided to fix the bug in the program, and thus this was created:

      1. Find humans.
      2. Kill them all.
      3. Define moment as 3000 milliseconds.
      4. Eat some brains.
      5. echo Muhahahahahahaha
      6. Collect a large properly formated data
  • Note to self: when talking to the press, don't use complicated technical jargon, like "debugging" :)

    I think what I actually said was "rather than debug a program to make it give the right answer, the students must debug the program to make the robot behave the way they want it to."

    I think many of you will actually like the hardware, software, and curriculum that we are designing. Checkout http://www.roboteducation.org/ [roboteducation.org] and http://pyrorobotics.org/ [pyrorobotics.org] The new version of the software will be based on Pyro, Pytho
  • Call me when they open enrollment to robots.
  • You mean there are schools left that didn't do this 20 years ago? Huh.
  • I'd also like to point out that Brooklyn College is introducing ``Exploring Robotics'' as a ``core'' (specifically for non-CS-majors; more like an upper level basic computers class for everyone). I believe it's planned to use Lego stuff---and it's being offered starting this Fall.

    For majors, there are other options (as in, taking an AI class with a professor who uses robots, or joining a group and programming AIBOs, etc.)

    • Re:CS isn't all about debugging programs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by engagebot (941678) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:04AM (#15711649)
      Yep. I'm really the last of the "real" CS students from LSU. Midway through my time in college, they started changing the classes over. Its more software development than anything else. Except starting out with .NET is not great in my opinion

      They got rid of all the architecture classes, especially the good one where you learn about *how* memory works, threading, processor scheduling, all that stuff. They also got rid of the OS class. I mean, they still have an OS class, but its now a touchy-feely class where you don't actually *learn* anything. I feel bad for the kids who are going through right behind me...

      We used to have a mandatory class on assembly too. Granted, its somewhat useless as a programming language in real life, but it still helps teach alot about what's going on at the low, low level.
        • As far as the programming languages go, in CSC, they now start the first two basic classes with regular old C (gcc and pico) and then they go object oriented after that. They've dropped java altogether from what I gather. We had an awesome java instructer (props to Dr Gwee), but he left and I think they just didn't get anyone to replace him.

          Until recently, it used to be several classes of C, and then the required electives you choose from were all the different object oriented languages. That way you had
      • What really sucked is that they used to require everyone to take Scheme (godawful useless language for most of the engineers). Then, the semester after I took the Scheme class (got put in the "advanced" section somehow... didn't really belong there since it was over my head and I'm an aero engineer, but was worth it anyways), they start up their new "Computing for Engineers" course (using Matlab). And now all of my professors assume we know matlab very well because that course is offered... but we never t
      • Shouldn't CS be exciting enough as it is if you're planning on persuing it as a degree? I went through the CS program at UGA back in the late 90's when everbody and their brother was looking to get a CS degree because of the dot com boom. There were a lot of people who just didn't belong in the program. They were folks who just weren't excited about computer science. They would moan and complain when they had to do assignments that required any real though and they'd never try out anything being taught

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