Welcome to the education column

Abstract

With this issue, we start a regular column on educational activities in robotics and automation. This is an important and emerging area of interest within the robotics community, and it is necessary that the magazine give timely visibility to the efforts in this field. Why is robotics and automation education so important, and why should we discuss it in a magazine section instead of giving space to other, similarly important, research and application areas? The simple answer is rather obvious: education is very important; however, there are many, less obvious, aspects that we need to emphasize. First of all, we need to give appropriate credit to teaching excellence, which is too often neglected. Moreover, we need to rethink the way robotics and its related technologies are presented to old and new audiences, including students and scholars of other disciplines. Robotics, as a mature discipline, is becoming less the domain of a restricted group of scientists and more a resource for the whole scientific community. To carry out a critical discussion of teaching methods, it is first necessary to document the new teaching approaches used in traditional robotics students’ classes in engineering and computer science courses. Furthermore, it will be useful to learn what is taught to the