On computer science major students' motivation in a practically oriented robotics course

Abstract

Educational robotics is considered to motivate students to learn principles of computing and computational thinking in many contexts. In this paper, we present the first experiences from our recent multimodal robotics course, that was given to more than 100 computer science major students at the University of Eastern Finland. Preliminary results show, aligned with suggestions from the literature, that hands-on robotics exercises and the course project work motivated students. Furthermore, results indicate that robotics would have a stronger role in ourcomputer science curriculum.