Educational robotics with robocode as a teaching tool to reduce student dropout in engineering courses

Abstract

Student evasion is a problem that affects institutions of higher education in general, causing impacts of social and economic nature. For this reason, it was adopted in the electrical engineering course, a mini course on using the Java programming language with robocode as a tool for learning education. This language has become increasingly popular for teaching students in universities in the areas of engineering because it has shown effectiveness regarding encouraging the teaching of programming with the open source educational game. This paper presents an efficient method to reduce the great escape of students. The mini course aims activities related to technologies in various aspects of computing: logical reasoning, mathematics, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and object-oriented programming through the integration with the Robocode software. The proposed activities were applied to students of higher education of the Universidade Federal do Ceará in the discipline of Introduction to Engineering. We also believe that these activities have shown the efficiency of educational Robotics as a tool for teaching and learning in object-oriented programming.