Brody Riopelle, a senior at the University of Michigan, demonstrated that MBots can simplify robotics education for younger students. This educational platform, primarily used for teaching robotics to university students, was repurposed to engage children with no prior coding experience. Utilizing Scratch, a user-friendly coding language, Riopelle partnered with the Center for Success Network to explore robotics at an elementary level.
Riopelle, now a U-M Robotics Department engineer, collaborated with Chad Jenkins, a robotics professor, with backing from the Sloan Foundation. His involvement with the Center for Success Network in Pontiac, MI, was inspired by his high school teacher, Serge Danielson-Francois. Together, they teamed up with Kendra Pitts from the Center for Success to establish a robotics camp for underserved students.
The MBot was central to their educational initiatives. “The MBot is an educational robotics platform designed to be adaptable to different types of robotics curricula at the undergraduate level,” Riopelle stated. With topics like controls and navigation, more than 300 MBots are employed in U-M’s Robotics Department, even in advanced courses.
This partnership with the Center for Success showcased MBot’s potential to introduce complex robotics concepts to younger students without needing extensive programming skills. Over the summer, Riopelle and a team of interns, including Tyler Simon from Georgia State University, Jacob Jack from Morehouse College, and Kori Kobylak from Berea College, developed a custom Scratch extension for MBot usage.
The Robotics Department’s Distributed Teaching Collaborative often involves cross-institution work. Kobylak took ROB 102 at Berea College, while Simon and Jack joined the Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering program in Chad Jenkins’ lab. Their efforts resulted in a high-level, user-friendly interface, enabling younger students at the Center for Success camp to tackle tasks typically assigned to U-M robotics students, such as programming an MBot to navigate a maze autonomously.
The MBot is equipped with several sensors, including LiDAR, camera, IMU, and wheel encoders, and actuators that are likely too advanced for younger students to work with directly, as it would require knowledge of C/C++ programming and embedded systems.
However, younger students are capable of understanding what those sensors are doing at a high level. Scratch provides a way to create a custom, intuitive interface for the MBot by designing blocks that mask the lower-level complexity of seemingly simple tasks.
For example, one of the Scratch blocks was ‘Is there an obstacle within [DISTANCE] meters in front of the MBot?’ This is an intuitive and clearly explained block that eliminates the need for the student to iterate through a LiDAR scan and check if the ranges fall within a threshold, as is expected at the undergraduate level in courses like ROB 102. However, this block still communicates the functionality of the LiDAR within the MBot system and introduces students to the technology at a high level.
Students at the Center for Success were thrilled. “To put it simply, the students thought this was really cool,” said Riopelle. Experiencing real-time control of robots was inspiring and exciting for them.
With this encouraging feedback, Riopelle and Danielson-Francois aim for students to pursue science and technology further, especially by joining the FIRST Robotics team, the Center for Success Outlanders, Team 26591, which Danielson-Francois established.
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