Practical Robotics Course for Non-Engineering Students - The Sequential Approach

Abstract

Multi-disciplinary courses in the universities are designed to prepare the non-technical students with the additional problem-solving skills through engineering knowledge. Unfortunately, to facilitate this mission, the syllabus of the engineering course must be re-design to meet this requirement. Therefore, in this paper, the Practical Robotic course has been offered to the students coming from the non-engineering faculty, to be specific, the students from the Faculty of Applied Science. The teaching strategy adopts the sequential approach in delivering the subject to them. The students are introduced with the critical concept of the autonomous system before jumping into the development phase. In the development phase, they were exposed to each component, one by one, with the assistance of individual lab module to master those knowledges. Once they have completed, they are prepared to finish their autonomous mobile robot with the minimal supervision from the educator. In the end, the performance of the students is measured through the program outcomes (POs) set by the EAC to test their understanding. As a result, with this approach, all POs are achieved, with the average of 75.67 percent and the technical capabilities of the students are increased significantly.