Organization of a Lego-robots contest offered to high school kids by engineering students within a project based learning environment

Abstract

Collecting experiences in project-based learning environments is very important for students of almost all subjects. Especially, for engineering students who mostly work in teams later on. The department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (HBRS) in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the so called “project weeks”. Three weeks of a semester are available to do some realworld projects besides the normal lectures [1]. In the last three summer terms since 2011 the organisation of a Lego-robots contest for High School kids was used as a realworld project for the project weeks at HBRS. The university students had to prepare and execute the contest in order to get their credit points for the project. This includes: find an overall motto of the contest, invent and prepare funny and interesting tasks for the robot-parcour, handle money issues, organize the two days of the contest including a welcome-show, meals, do calculation to score the winner team and do the final award ceremony. Preparing the contest provides project-related learning elements as well as engineering and team-development challenging elements. So it enables the students to connect theory and practice and to apply knowledge and skills to solve practical problems. The following article describes how the idea of organizing a robots contest for High School kids made its way to a student project, how the project was organized by the lecturer, how the three project weeks were organized and what feedback was obtained at the end by the students.