Musical Mimicry to Learn Audio Processing

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is widely used to promote deep learning, enhance critical thinking, help students create, build and critically evaluate design solutions to a variety of problems. e-Yantra is an initiative by IIT Bombay that conducts an annual e-Yantra Robotics Competition (eYRC) for college students. Teams who qualify selection test compete over a period of five months. 208 such teams comprising 832 students were alloted one of the themes. A "theme" may be regarded as a "hardware MOOC" where skills get taught through a singleplayer gaming paradigm. This paper describes the methodology implemented in the 7th edition (eYRC-2018), where we designed a "theme" based on Audio processing and Machine Learning. An important contribution has been to show how to design a "scalable" theme by using automatic evaluation that made it unique compared to other themes. This paper outlines the tasks designed for the competition and describes how technology can support students as they work on a theme so that motivation and thoughts are sustained. We then analyze the effectiveness of our approach based on the performance of teams.