Brooklyn College Wins Award to Develop Robotics Computer Science Course

Elizabeth Sklar

The Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE), a partnership of Georgia Tech College of Computing and Bryn Mawr College supported by funding from Microsoft Research, has awarded Brooklyn College a $10,000 grant to develop and implement a course that will use personal robots in the classroom to broaden student appreciation of computing.

The course, Introduction to Computing in C++, will teach first-semester students how to program a robot to perform specific tasks, such as drawing a square, in the C++ programming language.

The College was one of twenty-eight schools and colleges around the nation that were awarded the IPRE funding. In addition each of the recipients will receive a number of paperback book-size robots called Scribblers, along with IPRE software and class text, for use by students.

"We will be developing the curriculum for our course during the fall semester," said Associate Professor Elizabeth Sklar of the Computer and Information Sciences Department. "Then we plan to offer a first section of the course for evaluation starting in the spring of next year."

Sklar, whose own research interests include education robotics, drafted a proposal for the IPRE award in response to an open call that was issued by the group early last spring.

"We already offer a number of courses in which students use robots," said Sklar. "Students tend to get very excited about robotics," she noted.

"Brooklyn College’s inclusion in the program," said Professor Aaron Tenenbaum, chair of the Computer and Information Science Department, shows that "we are among the leaders in the field of computer science education across the nation."

"We have a key state of the art program here at Brooklyn College," he added.

Among the factors that will have to be taken into account during the development period, said Sklar, will be creating an interface to support C++, the computer language currently taught by the College in introductory courses, in place of an interface developed by IPRE which uses the Python language.

Fifty-five universities, colleges and high schools in the United States and abroad applied for the funding.

Other awardees besides Brooklyn College include Georgia State University, Harvey Mudd College, Indiana University, Ithaca College, Phillips Exeter Academy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas Tech University, University of Delaware, and University of Tennessee.