Upper Division Students Teaching Engineering Skills to Lower Division Students through Underwater Robotics

Many engineering students just starting out in their undergraduate career face problems with gaining hands on skills relevant to today’s workforce. The plethora of math, physics, and general education courses students take in their first two years of college often precludes students from obtaining hands-on engineering experience until their junior year. This paper describes a 10 week, hands-on, extra-curricular workshop, taught by upper division students, that gives lower division students an exciting introduction to practical skills in the fields of Engineering, Robotics, and Marine Technology. The aim of this workshop is to guide students through a design, build and test cycle of an ultra-low cost underwater robotics platformthe BudgetROV. This workshop involves CAD design, machining, soldering, and programming at an introductory level appropriate to lower division students across all engineering disciplines. In this paper, we describe the curriculum for this workshop and discuss student feedback that suggests the workshop will help students find further project opportunities (such as summer internships) and will help with the retention of engineering students to their majors. Introduction Many engineering students just starting out in their undergraduate career face problems with gaining hands on skills relevant to today’s workforce. The plethora of math, physics, and general education courses students take in their first two years of college often precludes students from obtaining hands-on engineering experience until their junior year. Although engineering freshman and sophomore students are encouraged to participate in extracurricular activities to obtain engineering project experience, many students (especially those who have never participated in high school robotics efforts such as FIRST robotics​) are afraid to join these activities because they feel they do not know enough yet to be a valuable contributor to a club or instructionally related project team. Some schools have attempted to give lower division engineering students hands-on project instruction by introducing freshman design courses into the required curriculum​. These courses have proven very successful, but may not be possible to implement at many colleges and universities due to resource constraints practical hands-on courses require a low faculty to student ratio and schools may just not have the funds to staff enough sections. This paper describes an approach to give lower division engineering students a structured introduction to hands-on engineering skills in a resource constrained environment. The approach is a 10-week, hands-on, extra-curricular​ workshop, ​taught by upper division students​, that guides students through a design, build and test cycle of an ultra-low cost underwater robotics platform BudgetROV. This workshop involves CAD design, machining, soldering, and programming at an introductory level appropriate to lower division engineering students across all engineering disciplines. Although the workshop is extra-curricular, it has the structure of a regular course (with a regular meeting time, weekly lesson plans, lectures and lab activities) to encourage those with little to no hands-on engineering experience to participate without the fear that they need prior knowledge to be a valued participant. Because the workshop is taught by upper-division students (who receive elective credit for their efforts), the offering of the workshop is solely constrained by the number of upper-division students wishing to teach it. Because the workshop is extracurricular, there is no set number of workshops that must be offered. In this paper, we describe the curriculum for this workshop (its overview, weekly lecture topics, and weekly activities) and discuss student feedback that suggests the workshop will give students the motivation and confidence they need to find further project opportunities (such as summer internships, clubs and instructionally related project teams) and will help with the retention of engineering students to their majors. We conclude by discussing possible future additions/modifications to the workshop. Workshop Overview The BudgetROV workshop was designed as a 10-week, extracurricular, student-led workshop to give lower division students a chance to obtain hands-on engineering skills. The BudgetROV (a homegrown, student-built, underwater remotely operated vehicle) was selected as the workshop project. An underwater ROV had a high ‘coolness’ factor to attract a wide range of students, and the budget aspect of the BudgetROV design (it is about 1⁄3 the cost of the leading low-cost underwater robot design the OpenROV​7​) made it affordable. The workshop was funded by a $500 grant from the Biology department and from a $30 workshop fee per student participant. The grant and fee covered all the materials costs for building three BudgetROVs (see Table 1). The enrollment was limited to 15 students to allow for a manageable student teacher to student participant ratio and to allow for team sizes of 5 students each building one of the three BudgetROVs. The workshop was advertised to students in the College of Engineering through flyers that included details about the workshop (including its fee) and a contact email. An astonishing 47 students responded, so we gave the 15 spots to the first 15 responders. As the flyers were first put up in the EE building (trafficked by all University students, but more heavily by Electrical (EE) and Computer Engineering (CPE) students), the composition of the workshop ended up being 3 CPE students, 11 EE students, and 1 Computer Science. Of those students, 7 were freshman, 7 were sophomores and the computer science student was a graduate student seeking hands-on skills outside the realm of a strict computer science degree. The 15 students completed a doodle poll to find a weekly 3-hour meeting time for the workshop. After the first week of the workshop, one of the CPE students dropped out because of a change in his course schedule disallowing him to attend the agreed upon meeting time.