Abstract:

Considering the importance of practice in robotics or mechatronics education and training, the paper presents how to learn engineering through competitions, implemented activities to motivate the students and attract high school students.

If some years ago, many small-to-medium projects and competitions were related to the use of some commercial kits such as LEGO Mindstorms, in the last years, competitions that use more sophisticated robotics kits appeared (such as FIRST Tech Challenge, Bosch Future Mobility Challenge, NAO robots etc.).

The robotics/mechatronics competition represents a playful way how to learn the basic ideas of sensors, actuation, robotics, measurement, control etc. A national event in the field of robotics is the Romanian Students Mechatronics Competition where our students from the Mechatronics specialization participated from 2010. The competition had two contests, one about programming of a controller to control a mechatronics system and other contest about mobile robots. The faculty team had good results and won some prizes.

Romania, as other European countries, is suffering from a lack of attractiveness to science and technology by high school students. Though job offers are high in these areas, students consider the subjects somewhat too hard, and they frequently show a considerable information deficit about what is taught in engineering programmes. Robotics/mechatronics can be an ideal way of changing that attitude, due to the multidisciplinary and hands-on nature of the involved work. In Craiova the first steps to introducing robotics to high school students as an attractive and involving way of learning were taken when we organized a robotics competition based on Lego Mindstorms (2008).

An upwards trend in the schools’ interest in robots was caused by the organization of a robotics festival, Craiova Robotics Days, beginning from 2011, where recent research results from university and industrial groups were presented, together with competitions involving high school students. This event is organised by us in the framework of the European Robotics Week.

In the last 5 years, with the help of SMC company, we organized a competition for high school students: “Let’s Learn Robotics and Mechatronics”. This competition has two contests, one for the robotics field and one for mechatronics. The robotics contest is a mobile robotics contest, while the mechatronics contest is organized in cooperation with SMC, which offers the mechatronic equipment.

In the last 4 years a new robotics competition began to be more attractive for high school students: FIRST Tech Challenge. The FIRST Tech Challenge competition has taken place in Romania since 2016. If in the first year only 54 high school students teams participated, for this year (2019/2020) there were 190 high school students teams participating. In the first year, only one college from Craiova participated, last year were four teams/colleges, and for this year five colleges (from our county) will participate. The experience of high school students and mentors/professors will be presented in the paper.

Every year a great number of enthusiastic students build a robot and participate in competitions. There are two reasons for this: fascination of robots and possibility to participate in guided hands-on workshops.

The paper presents the feedback of the students after competitions. These contests develop their technical skills, creativity and teamwork.

Keywords:

Contest, robotics, mechatronics, problem-based learning, team-based learning.