1. Personal Robots: An Impactful Context for Introductory CS Education Prof. Tucker Balch, Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Stewart Tansley, Microsoft Research Prof. Doug Blank, Bryn Mawr College Dr. Jay Summet, Georgia Institute of Technology Deepak Kumar, Mark Guzdial, Keith O’Hara, Daniel Walker, Jared Jackson, Gaurav Gupta, Monica Sweat The Institute for Personal Robots in Education

2. IPRE Overview Mission: Make education more fun and effective through the use of personal robots. Audience: All levels, from middle school to graduate school. Joint effort hosted at Georgia Tech with Bryn Mawr (+ MSR). 3 year seed funding provided by Microsoft Research. Special ingredient and hypothesis: a personal robot for every student programmer

3. IPRE: Lead Institutions Georgia Institute of Technology Tier 1 research university. 15,000 students. Mostly male. Bryn Mawr College Liberal arts college near Philadelphia, founded in 1885. 1200 undergraduate women, 400 graduate students (co-ed). New program begun in 2000 in CS offers BA in Computer Science, minor in CS, and minor in Computational Methods.

4. First Target: Introductory CS Why this target? Importance: Declining undergraduate CS enrollment. No one to fill jobs; loss of intellectual capital. Can CS be more appealing? Relevance: Robots are a compelling platform for explaining process (the essence of computing). Impact: Introductory CS is a required or encouraged course for many students.

5. Example: How Context Can Help 1999: Intro CS required for all degrees at Georgia Tech = ~2000 students every year. Success rate: Women: 61% passed Men: 72% passed Non-CS Majors: 50% passed

6. Example: How Context Can Help 2003, A new approach: Media context. Success rate improved: Women: 88% passed Men: 84% passed Non-CS Majors: 86% passed

8. MSR for IPRE Microsoft Research – Founded 1991 – 800 researchers, 55 research areas, 6 labs – 800 interns in 2007 – 3500 peer-reviewed papers to date – External Research – university partnerships: Science – http://microsoft.com/science http://microsoft.com/science Computer Science – http://research.microsoft.com/ur http://research.microsoft.com/ur – Research + Education Microsoft & Robotics – MSRS announced summer 2006 – v1.5 available today, $0 until you sell robots – “A Robot In Every Home” Scientific American, Jan 2007/Feb 2008 – http://microsoft.com/robotics http://microsoft.com/robotics

9. Personal Robots for CS: Components of the Approach 1.A personal robot. 2.Approachable software/programming environment. 3.An engaging curriculum. 4.Quantitative assessment. Philosophy: The curriculum drives the design of the robot, software, and text. Engage the community.

10. A Robot for CS Education Note: This is not robotics research. Personal: Every student with her own robot. No labs with expensive robots. Instead: Inexpensive robots in the campus bookstore. Reliable: No mystery regarding “does it work?” Break the compile-download-run cycle. Leverage the desktop. ?

11. IPRE “Pilot” Robot: $195 3 Light sensors 2 IR sensors 2 Line sensors Stall sensor Speaker 3 LEDs 2 motors Bluetooth wireless

12. IPRE Pilot Robot v2: $149.95 256x192 color camera Raw images (0.5 HZ) On board color segmentation (6 HZ) Battery voltage sensing Very bright rear facing LED I 2 C extension port IR emitters and receiver Obstacle/Wall detection Inter-Robot Communication

13. IPRE Gyro: $120

14. Software for CS Education Myro: My Robot. Focus on learnability HAPI – Human-Application Programming Interface Pedagogically scalable – easy for first-time users, yet powerful and flexible for more advanced users Phase 1 is Python-centric, platform agnostic. Follow on language agnostic.

15. Software Stack

16. Myro Software Sample Program (Python) def main(): while True: Left, Right = getIR() if Left: turnRight(turnSpeed) elif Right: turnLeft(turnSpeed) else: forward(cruiseSpeed) # Avoiding Obstacles from myro import * initialize(ask(“What port?”)) # program settings... cruiseSpeed = 0.6 turnSpeed = 0.5

17. Example Test Question Assume you have routines: TurnLeft90() TurnRight90() GoForwardOneFoot() Write the code that would cause a robot to follow the illustrated path. 2 ft 1 ft

18. Sample Assignment Corral Exiting/Escape Imagine a corral (an enclosed area with maze like partitions and an entrance) with a light source at the entrance (as shown in the figure to the right). Given the robot's position, can we design a behavior that will enable the robot to exit the corral?

19. CS1 Text (Chapter Outline) Chapter 1 The World of Robots Chapter 2 Robots: Personal or Otherwise Chapter 3 Building Brains Chapter 4 Sensing the World Chapter 5 Making Decisions Chapter 6 Behaviors Chapter 7 Control Paradigms Chapter 8 Making Music Chapter 9 Communication Chapter 10 Computing & Computation Chapter 11 Artificial Intelligence Chapter 12 Robots in the World

20. Data Collection and Assessment Population to date: At Georgia Tech 2 “traditional” CS-1 courses 4 “robot” CS-1 courses At Bryn Mawr: 2 “robot” CS-1 courses Fall 2008: Roll out at up to 8 additional institutions.

21. The Course at GT

22. Video

24. BMC Pilot Course – Spring 2007 24 students (22 women, 2 men) Learned CS concepts through robots. Robots made learning experience more hands-on, tangible, and exciting. Most frustrating parts were dealing with robot hardware inconsistencies. Viewed CS as a type of logic and problem solving; requiring patience & thought. Discovered that CS and robots are applicable to the real world.

25. BMC Pilot Courses Liked the use of personal robots Did not like quirky issues with Scribblers Learned programming and problem solving (as opposed to just robotics)

26. > 90% success rate among CS majors. Students felt that the course was focused on computer science, not on robotics. The frustrations in the course were mostly about the robot: Under-featured, difficult to maintain. No significant difference in success/failure rates from robotics vs. non-robotics sections (Spring 2007; still assessing Fall 2008). GT Initial Results

27. Yes! Textbook is jointly edited by wiki Myro is under BSD license Hardware specs, firmware, etc will be published That’s Great But is it “Open”

28. Want a robot? www.roboteducation.org

29. Video