Stirring Up the Learning to Program Robotic Arms Through the Generation of Student Handwriting

The use of robotics arms provides students several advantages in the teaching and learning process, compared to methods based on simulation programs. Moreover, programming the robotic arm to imitate a human action previously carried out by the students, makes them to have a better personal satisfaction. Following up this idea, a lab session has been designed and tested by the authors. It is composed by the following phases: Students first register their personal handwriting on a digitizing tablet. Next, they develop a program to make that a commercial robot writes such piece of handwriting. Then, the commercial robotic arm produce such piece of handwriting on a digitizing tablet. Finally, a comparison between the original handwriting and the one made by the robot is worked out. To evaluate the success of the proposed lab session, a survey was issued to students who followed the course in robotics last semester with encouraging results.