Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to report on an educational project created to make technical education more attractive and to attract primary school pupils to study technical fields. The paper briefly presents the current situation in technical education in the Czech Republic and the efforts of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen to make it more attractive. The paper presents a one-year multidisciplinary student project, which was successfully implemented several times in 2017-2022 to motivate pupils of elementary schools (and high schools) to study technology. The student project is focused on the design and commissioning of a mobile robot based on the Arduino platform using modern methods in the design, production and commissioning phase. The project includes the use of a modern SolidWorks CAD system for the design of the robot chassis with an emphasis on lightweight construction and assembly of the entire robot from pre-modeled purchased parts; the manufacturing of the robot chassis using additive technologies (3D printing from PLA material); the creation of a digital twin of the robot and the programming of the basic behavior in the TinkerCAD simulation environment; the transfer of code to the physical robot and the implementation of other more advanced tasks (avoiding obstacles, line following, passage through a maze, etc.). The student project can be implemented as a whole within a one-year course (motivational effect for pupils of elementary schools within the framework of leisure activities) or in individual parts in cyclically recurring teaching e.g. at high schools, where whole subjects or their parts are devoted to individual stages of the project. The student project is based on the principle of project based learning, where the aim is to provide pupils with sufficient information relevant to solve the task, but at the same time not to overwhelm them with a large amount of information, the applicability of which will not be completely obvious to them at that moment. This approach is in contrast to the usual teaching model used at elementary schools and high schools in the Czech Republic, where the student is overloaded with a huge amount of information that he has to process (memorize) often without emphasizing the mutual relations, without knowing what he will be able to use them for. In the opinion of the authors, this is one of the reasons for the low attractiveness of technical fields, and project based learning could contribute to changing this situation.

Keywords:

Project based learning, additive technologies, computer aided design, digital twin, mobile robot, TinkerCAD, Arduino.