UKREF UK Robotics Education Forum

Mission Statement - Context and Philosophy

Preamble:

It is generally accepted that a successful national economy, part of a global and competitive world economy must be capable of producing products that can be exchanged for other products ( either directly or indirectly ). These may be soft products such as banking servicds, or hard products such as manufactured goods, agricultural products etc. Prudence suggests that a mix of soft and hard products be output and the over-specialisation into a few narrow sectors is best avoided.

Proposition:

The future success of the UK economy will, to a significant extent, rest on its ability to design and produce high technology products. Even in services such as banking advanced software for decision support, risk analysis and systems modeling will play an important role. Staying at the leading edge of advances in medicine, manufacturing, and manufacturing will also depend on the availability of well educated scientists, engineers and designers.

A particularly good way of encouraging young people to take up science and engineering studies as part of their further education is to give them the opportunity to explore the world of robotics and related subjects such as computer programming and mechatronics. This, in turn, requires the availability of a large number of teachers at all level of the education system. As the number of maths, computing and science graduates entering the teaching profession is not as high as it could be, and, as many teachers have not had much exposure to robotics and computer programming, and as resources for teaching teachers in robotics and computer programming are relatively limited it will be necessary to develop materials, teaching resources and training programs to provide teachers with the relevant knowledge and confidence in applying it.

It is a tenet of UKREF that, in order to stimulate a wide scale interest in robotics and programming that not only science and maths teachers should teach robotics, but that teachers of language, history, arts and other non technical subjects should be able to use robotics in their teaching using systems and software that they have developed, and, in so doing, demonstrate to their students that programming and robotics are not simply the exclusive domain of scientists and technologists.

The ability to write and design computer programs that can drive both real robots as well as simulated (computer game) robots should be a widely held skill.

Aims:

To encourage teachers and to provide the training that will give them the necessary confidence to

• construct, program and interact with robots
• design robots to solve particular tasks, or to illustrate and explore possible approaches to tackling those tasks
• to have a general ability to write and understand computer programs

Many teachers, burdened as they are with much bureaucratic work and a judgemental inspection system have lost much of the "sparkle and improvisation" that can make teaching exciting. Many are afraid of computer technology and are not particularly confident about using computers, let alone writing computer programs.

What chance then to get them to experiment with the even more distant realms of embedded systems as found in robots, or with the complexities of computer games software.

This need not be so.

Getting teachers to program - and (more importantly) teach their students to program

Over the last 20 years computer programming languages have evolved considerably. It is no longer necessary to learn how to program using languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN or MUMPS.

Various graphical programming environments have been developed that hide a lot of low level details and help the programmer write code "visually" by putting together "little graphical building blocks".

Not that long ago attempts were being made to popularise LOGO and to use it in schools at all levels. Sadly, LOGO was not an overwhelming success, even though it is still alive and well and constantly being improved and modern versions come with many superb teaching resources.
The initial version of LEGO Mindstorms used a visual programming environment overlaid on top of LOGO ( a visual LOGO if you will ) with a wonderful metaphor of constructing programs by plugging together little lego brick like graphical icons.
The current version of Lego .NXT uses a visual programming environment based on LabView from National Instruments.
Microsoft's recent offering for robotics application development, Microsoft Visual Robotics Studio, is another visual programming environment.
In the UK, Flowol, is yet another visually oriented programming language that is used in teaching microcontroller programming in schools.

Visual programming environments are excellent for getting started in programming. However, at some stage, when developing more complex applications they are simply too slow or too limited. Therefore it is important to encourage teachers with a keen interest in robotics and programing to learn how to code in mainstream programming languages such as C, C++, Java or C#, as well as scripting languages such as e.g. Python, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

What will UKREF aim to provide ?

1. Courses and workshops to encourage the study and teaching of robotics at all levels and for all peoples

• primary
• secondary
• further education
• at home
• in the media
• in manufacturing
• in universities

[ Note: at the university level there has been much good collaborative work e.g.

• a collaborative project involving MIT and Cambridge University Engineering Department in putting together hardware, software and teaching materials for teaching mechatronics at about first/second year undergraduate level
• the European INTERSTUDY pilot project in mechatronics involving the universities of Tallinn, Helsinki, Kaunas and Bochum ( part of the EU Leonardo da Vinci program )

2. Up to date information on

• available hardware
• available software
• available books
• available training / courses / workshops

3. Running/organising courses, workshops, conferences and competitions

4. Encouraging more girls to become interested and involved in robotics and computing and to follow careers in science and engineering It is a sad fact that it is mostly boys that are fascinated by rotobics. Yet, with inspired teaching girls have produced some remarkable work at both school and university level. Robots have huge potential in assisted living and , also, in helping individuals explore their feeling and interactions with the world. They have, for example, great potential in extending the psychoanalytic work with children through the medium of interacting with toys intitiated by people such as Klein and Winnicott. As AI techniques develop further and robots are imbued with "feelings and emotions" there will be much scope for developing systems that will greatly benefit humanity. There will, also, no doubt be many ethical issues to resolve along the way as well.