Lego wheeled robots used to nurture computational thinking and programming skills by TMU Center for General Education

Source: Center for General Education

Published on 2021-06-07

In March 2021, the Center for General Education held the Workshop on First Experience in Electromechanical Integration with Lego Wheeled Robot Competition.


Instructor Nian-Heng Cheng (鄭年亨), who has rich experience in programming teaching, and Instructor Ming-Cheng Li (李明政), who has been promoting robot education for many years, were invited to guide TMU students in hands-on work and motivate their learning interest in programming.

Instructor Ming-Cheng Li (left) and Instructor Nian-Heng Cheng (right) discuss program writing and pathfinding with students.

This is the first time TMU has offered a Cyber-Physical System course for programming learning. Coupled with active learning mechanisms, the course helped students learn to program graphically, manipulate Lego wheeled robots, as well as perform real-time error detection and correction. It was observed that the students quickly gained learning successes with growing interest in programming.

 

The Center for General Education has been advocating for interdisciplinary and computational thinking in education since 2017. In response to TMU’s vision of developing health science experts in the AI era, the Center added “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” as a required course in the academic year 2019 to enhance the digital literacy in programming among TMU students.

Instructors and students happily demonstrate their robots.