ROBOTICS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOGICAL THINKING AMONG FIRST SEMESTER STUDENTS IN FACULTY OF ENGINEERING (FI) AT UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO

In Mexico pedagogical robotics has become a formal teaching tool, through curricular and additional courses; its incorporation to the higher educational engineering implies integrating various disciplines like mathematics, mechanics, informatics, electricity and electronics.

A large group of academics from the Engineering Faculty from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, started the instructional project “Improvement of the educational quality in the Basic Sciences through robotics” (Mejoramiento de la calidad educativa en Ciencias Básicas a través de la robótica), under the “Program for Projects that Support Innovation and Improvement regarding learning” (Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Innovación y Mejoramiento de la Enseñanza), PAPIME by its acronym in Spanish, which one of its objectives is involving the students in the first´s semesters in engineering school with the elaboration of automatized prototypes and robots, not only will it promote the research but it will help them relate class concepts among its applications to the design of ordinary life styles, and the development of alternate team work, through the learning obtained in the solving of problems and projects.

The theoretical structures for the project are based in the constructivism and constructionism, which are the pillars in which the pedagogical robotics are based on, which recently have taken great importance in formal teaching, for its advantages in working methods and result obtaining.

For this project, we are working in different learning environments, one is the traditional teaching where students attend their regular classes, other in a room with computer equipment, where students learn the rudiments of a microcontroller development board, through which they control the device designed, and the proper manufacturing environment, where by means of collaborative work and advised by students in their last semester of Mechatronics Engineering and related robotics careers, materialize their projects and submit final work in the corresponding subject.

This paper discussed about the activities in diagnosis, planning, implementation, evaluation and analysis of some of the results obtained in the different works that have been done, and the subjects that have engaged theory with practice, and the problems that have arisen and how they have tried to solve them.