Mobile Robotics Integration in Introductory Undergraduate Engineering Courses

The first impressions of freshmen students in graduate level courses at Universities may have a key importance in his/her decision about career and resilience during the graduation course. This paper reports the usage of mobile robotics in an Introductory Engineering course aimed to increase the students motivation and retention, and give students an overview about the course they will follow during the next years. The pedagogical approach relies on the use of integrating courses, which offers related contents with different approaches. In this specific case, the construction and programming of a line following robot involves the "Introduction to Mechanical Engineering" and "Scientific Computing" undergraduate courses, which are offered at the same time. An anonymous survey with students was conducted and results shows that 100% of the students think that the approach helped them better learn programming and more than 94% of the students affirmed that the projects helped them learn better how to solve problems. Moreover, in a scaled of 0 to 5, students average evaluation of the robotics projects rank is 4.7.