Using Robots in Beginning Computer Science Courses

• Home Page
• NSF CCLI project

Videos

• A video of the 2006 lab in the CSci 1901 course using the AIBO dogs.
  The lab was done in Scheme. Remember, you can do whatever you want in Scheme, even get a dog to dance!
  Work partially supported by NSF under grant DUE-CCLI-0511304 and by the Bush Foundation program at the University of Minnesota to improve learning in large classes. For more information on the NSF project visit Extending the Next Generation Robot Laboratory to Increase Diversity in Undergraduate CS Programs
• Videos on YouTube of the AIBO labs done in CSci 1901 Spring 2007.

Courses

• IofT 1910w -- Robot Pets - Fall 2006, a freshman seminar using the Sony dogs AIBO.
• CSci 5980, sec 4 - Legged Robots - Spring 2005

Code

The source code and complete instructions fro the use of the AIBOs from scheme (written by John Chilton) are available at http://www.cs.umn.edu/~chilton/amorai/

Publications and Presentations

• Richard Barnes, John Chilton, Maria Gini, Elizabeth Jensen, and Maitreyi Nanjanath, Extending the Next Generation Robot Laboratory to Increase Diversity in Undergraduate CS Programs , poster at NSF CCLI Grantees Conference, Washington, DC, August 2008.
• Richard Barnes and Maria Gini, Developing a Text-Based MMORPG to Motivate Students in CS1, AI Education Colloquium, AAAI 2008, July 2008.
• John Chilton and Maria Gini, Using the AIBOs in a CS1 course. In AAAI Spring Symposium -- Robots and Robot Venues: resources for AI education, pp. 24–28, AAAI, Technical Report SS-07-09, 2007.
  
• J. Chilton and M. Gini, Creating Cooperative Competition: Learning Games for the Classroom, presentation at Conference on Enhancing Student Learning: Conversations About Research and Practice, University of Minnesota, April 2007.
• J. Chilton, S. Watters, and M. Gini, Learning Games: Creating Cooperative Competition, presentation at Collaboration Conference, Minneapolis, November 2006.
• M. Gini, J. Pearce, and K. Sutherland. Using the Sony AIBOs to Increase Diversity in Undergraduate CS Programs, in Proc. of the Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, IAS-9, Japan (March 2006) pp 1033-1040.
• M. Gini, J. Pearce, and K. Sutherland. Extending the Next Generation Robot Laboratory to Increase Diversity in Undergraduate CS Programs, poster at NSF CCLI Showcase, SigCSE 2006, Houston, TX (March 2006).

Team members

Faculty:
Maria Gini
Jan Pearce, Berea College
Karen Sutherland, Augsburg College
Students:
Richard Barnes (undergraduate)
John Chilton (undergraduate)
Elizaebth Jensen (PhD)
Maitreyi Nanjanath (PhD)
Shana Watters (PhD)