Chief Delphi - Come MOOC with us- An invitation to mentors and students

Team 247 has an idea, and we would like you to participate.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is David Lame, and I am entering my third season as a mentor with Team 247, Da Bears, from Berkley, Michigan. During about that same time, I have also taken several classes online at MOOC sites. A MOOC is a Massively Open Online Course. These courses are free, or very low cost, classes taught by universities or other organizations online. They cover a wide variety of topics, including engineering, computer science, and related topics that would be of interest to members of the First Robotics community.

MOOC classes can be introductory courses that require little or no background knowledge, or they can be advanced, graduate school level courses. I have taken classes that offered brief introductions to quadcopter navigation, a class that paralleled AP Physics, a class on Quantum Computing, and a class on Magic in the Middle Ages. The institutions offering the courses have included MIT, Berkley, the Technical University of Munich, and Microsoft Corporation. Some required a couple of hours a week to watch a video. Some required the same level of commitment that a PhD student would have to apply to the corresponding real class.

I decided to see if I can combine my interest in MOOCs with my interest in First Robotics. With the support of Team 247, I came up with a project called BearMooc. I, or other mentors, will enroll in the class. The mentor will serve as a sort of teaching assistant, with a special emphasis on how to use the material in First Robotics. MOOCs typically release new lectures and homework weekly. As those lessons are released, the teaching assistant mentor will provide commentaries on those lessons in an online blog, and we will provide a discussion forum for students and mentors to discuss the class homework and how it can be used by our teams.

The target audience for this project includes mentors and students. For students, it is a way of getting exposure to more advanced educational material without the actual commitment of time or (parents’) money represented by a “real” class. MOOCs have certain levels of performance to obtain some sort of “certificate of completion”, but you can enroll for free and do as much or as little as time and interest require. BearMooc will provide the added benefit of providing contact with people who will relate that material to our hands on activities in First Robotics.

For mentors, there are other benefits. I hope that we can work together to try and find ways to make some of the advanced material accessible and usable by high school students, and, as always with First, to inspire them to pursue these fields of study throughout their lives. For those of us employed in technical areas, it serves as a form of continuing education, and might provide refresher courses. For those mentors who did not study engineering, they may wish to “catch up” a bit on the theoretical aspects of our robotics activities.

For my introduction to this project, I have chosen a class called Mobile Robotics. It is a brief, four week long, class, offered by an Australian group called open2study.com. I haven’t taken any classes from that organization yet, so I am not sure what to expect, but from the course description I expect a very simple overview of robotic sensing, navigation, and control. It is taught by Dr. Michelle Dunn, a professor at the University of Swinburne. It looks like it ought to be accessible to high school students, and will probably not require knowledge of higher mathematics. After that class is complete, there will be other classes, but not between January and April. I expect to be too busy.

To participate in the BearMooc project, enroll in the class at open2study.com by going to that site, and finding Mobile Robotics in the list of free courses. Register by following the instructions there. Then, go to 247dabears.vbulletin.net, and register there for the BearMooc discussion forum. The class begins Sunday, October 11, at 6:00 pm. Don’t worry if you are reading this later than that. It’s a MOOC. They’re pretty flexible about being late.

One disclaimer: I could have waited until I was truly ready and prepared to do this, but what would be the fun of that? The truth is that I’m diving right in and throwing this project together. I put the web site up last night. In other words, I’m “winging it”. The web site looks a bit unpolished, and I’m going to be feeling this out as I go along. I encourage you to join me on the adventure.

And one final MOOC endorsement. I have chosen a simple, introductory, class for BearMooc. If you are interested in the opposite end of the MOOC spectrum, there is a class that started a couple of days ago at Edx.org. The class is called Underactuated Robotics. It shadows a course of the same name at MIT. I took it last year, and it was a truly phenomenal class. It’s not for the faint of heart, though. It’s the real course that they teach at MIT. It is basically a class in optimal non-linear control theory. If you want to see how the real pros are learning, go there. If you wish to complete the class, be prepared for a lot of work, but since it’s a MOOC, you could just browse around. They’re flexible.