Office Phone: (919) 660-6550
Office hours: TBA, any time my door is open (which is most of the time), or by appointment
This courses is the Computer Science majors' version of CompSci 89s.
After taking this course, students should be able to fulfill the following
goals with the listed objectives:
| Week | Discussion | Lab |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 | Mobile robot architectures and challenges | Reactive robots (NXT-G and LabView) |
| 3 | Mentoring goals/Kinematics & sensing | Grid-based maps (RobotC) |
| 4-6 | Effective classroom management/Robot design motifs, | Robot problems: path planning, Monte Carlo Localization, and color segmentation (LeJOS NXJ, Python) |
| 7-13 | Reflection & designing effective challenges / topics in robotics and vision related to projects | Course projects /Mentoring @ DSA |
| 14 | Exhibition preparation | Project demonstrations and robot exhibitions |
Discussion on 6:00-6:50 on Mondays in North Building 311 and lab sessions 3:30pm-5:30 on Thursdays in North Building 311. Students will also work on robot projects in the Robotics Teaching Lab; North Building 018.
Mentoring sessions will run from 4:00-5:30 in the Academy Building of Durham School of the Arts starting October 7. Students also need to attend 2 Saturday sessions.
This course is collocated with CompSci 89s. |
Office: D235 LSRC Office Phone: (919) 660-6550 Office hours: TBA, any time my door is open (which is most of the time), or by appointment |
M. J. Mataric The Robotics Primer (Workbook). MIT Press, 2007.
Most software for the course will be provided via this website. You can use computer science department-owned laptops during class. If you would like to use your own laptop, you will need to purchase the LEGO NXT Education software from LEGO Education
As part of the requirements for the course, students are required to attend weekly mentoring session in Durham Public Schools. Durham Public Schools will conduct a criminal record check on volunteers who may have unsupervised contact with children. Successful completion of the course is subject to satisfactory completion of the background check and any other Durham Public Schools requirements.
As part of this course, you will need to travel off campus to Durham School of the Arts. You may choose to drive your own car, be driven by one of your classmates, or walk. You are not required to drive your own car or provide any of other classmates with transportation, but that is permitted.
Travel off campus has inherent risks. Your instructor has attempted to minimize and control these risks through careful design and organization of your service experience. However, a certain level of risk is inevitable, and it is important that you understand this so that you may make an informed decision to take this course.
The service for this course is an integral part of the learning experience for the class. The mentoring experience will serve as a laboratory for the technical, pedagogical, and ethical concepts that are investigated in this course.
Service-learning links classroom learning with service to communities. Service opportunities are developed through collaboration among faculty, students, and individuals and organizations in the community. Service placements are designed to meet two criteria: to enhance the educational goals of a course and to serve the public good by providing a needed service to individuals, organizations, schools, or other entities in the community. Students involved in service-learning make a commitment to engage in a service project or to complete a specified number of hours of service work. Through structured activities of reflection and analysis, they are asked to integrate their service experience with the other materials of the course.Service-learning goes beyond extracurricular community service because it involves participants in reading, reflection, and analysis. Credit is awarded not for service alone, but for academic work integrating the service experience. At its best, service-learning enhances and deepens students understanding of an academic discipline or subject, while providing them with experience that develops leadership and life skills and engages them in critical reflection about individual, institutional, and social ethics.
There will be several types of assignments during the term, each contributing to your final grade by approximately the following percentages:
| Projects & assignments | 50% |
| Service learning/journals | 25% |
| Tests/Papers | 25% |
Individual extensions will be granted only for medical reasons (see the Short-term Illness Notification policy) or other circumstances beyond your control that must be presented with an official Dean's excuse. We do not grant extensions after an assignment is due, you must request an extension before an assignment is due.
If you have personal reasons to ask for an extension, and you do so at least a week in advance, it's possible to get one, so please ask.
Any work in this course that does not include an explicit policy about working with others is assumed to be work you do on your own. Occasionally you will be given work to do with explicit permission to collaborate.