Abstract:

Robotics is an extremely fascinating field of engineering, which is used in different areas. Many young high-school students are interested in this topic and want to realize own projects, but a lack of access to the topic, knowledge, and whom to ask, rapidly stops their development. On the other hand, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) departments, like the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), would like to increase the diversity of their students and staff and run a diverse number of projects to foster underrepresented groups. We present a project that tries to address both of these issues by running a robotic competition addressing high-school students and working in close collaboration with their teachers.

Target group are 14 to 18 years old High school students, who have at least some interest in Engineering and want to realize a technical project in a team of classmates. The participants must design, develop and build fully autonomous robots solving a specific task - which changes from year to year. This building-process starts from the very first idea and ends in a well designed robot, usually not only technically solving the task, but also conveying a specific team style and thus also including artistic aspects into the whole project. A key difference to similar competitions is that TUM doesn’t provide a more or less complete set of finished modules, but instead off-the shelf components. The skill set required to purse personal projects is therefore an implicitly taught part of our project.

Students in the master’s program of Electrical and Computer Engineering guide the interested target group through the project-year, explain difficult correlations in simple words and guide the young teams. Both sides can profit from this construction. While the participants’ knowledge increases immediately, the tutors train their soft skills and leadership competencies.

As the advisors are only a few years older than the high-school students all can talk to each other like friend, ask questions about the project and talk as well about their decision it which subject to major in. The positive feedback inspires TUM to enlarge the project in the next years.

Keywords:

STEM, Robotics, STEM education.