ROS/TurtleBot Education Project - Input Wanted!

[Mariana Liebman-Pelaez]

Hello,

My name is Mariana and I am working with OSRF to help facilitate teaching robotics courses using the TurtleBot.  Basically, we are looking to provide an online space so that users and educators can share their experience using TurtleBot to collaboratively design robotics courses.  Right now we're in the initial stages and are brainstorming ways in which this can be done.  One idea is to create a Git web repo that acts like a "course database" where users can search for course material based on keywords relevant to the robotics course they are looking to teach.

I know that many of you have previously worked on education projects using TurtleBot. If anybody has any thoughts from previous discussions or input as to what they'd like to see done, that would be great (for instance, I saw on the education SIG page that there are notes from a ROSCon meeting that might be useful to us). 

Again, we are at the initial stages of this project so I will send out an update once we get a better idea of what we'll be working with!

Best,

Mariana Liebman-Pelaez

[Paul van der Vorst]

Hi Mariana,

I'm happy to hear that you are working on this, and thanks for picking up the conversation!

I like the idea of using a git repo to work on education material. There are two ways I imagine the curriculum can be built.

1) Start with a strong backbone: layout what an ideal curriculum would look like, and start building on this by filling in all of the course modules.

2) Start with the minimum viable product: there is a need for better TurtleBot tutorials, so perhaps we should start by making those. Starting with some separated content in the form of tutorials that will help users perform different tasks. This is a good idea because each tutorial will be immediately beneficial on its own, and the tutorials can later be amalgamated, with additional material, into a curriculum.

Were you thinking of TurtleBot education in the academic sense, something that profs can pickup, or the self-learning kind, where tutorials will help people at home or in labs get started with TurtleBot?

Cheers,

Paul

Paul van der Vorst | Clearpath Robotics | Marketing Manager

p: 519 513 2416 x816 | e: pvande...@clearpathrobotics.com

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[Isaac Isao Saito]

Though I wonder how my post fits to the subject, I'd like to share
that recently we've made a couple of workshop contents both of which
we're trying to take advantage of its interactiveness with.

One is workshop material for OpenRTM [1] where attendees who range
from college students to industry professionals bring their own
`Windows` machine (novice users are more likely to use Windows. Also
by the security restriction enforced for corporate user's machines,
no-installation is much appreciated). We put all material into
thumbdrives, and by the `git pull` script we added, attendees may
fetch the possible change/improvements at the beginning of the
workshop. Also with some (hopefully some) git knowledge, they can
contribute back by opening pull requests from the thumbdrive (the 1st
workshop will take place later this month so we'll see how many PRs
thrive in).

Another example is ROS workshop in Tokyo [3] where we provided again
zero-install bootable ROS thumbdrive, which contains Ubuntu + ROS.
Similarly, you can run ROS tutorials even on Windows machine. With
this one, github integration is less apparent but actually powerful;
combined with our own Jenkins CI server, creating .iso file that is to
be burnt into USB is automated [5] with a single script file
maintained on github.

What we've done might sound more like contents infrastructure that may
not directly trigger educational momentum. While I agree with that, we
also admit the importance of maintenance of contents, especially
integrating improvements with minimum workload, to make the tutorial
contents grow. And I believe that's one of the things that ROS has
been spending so much efforts and why it's successful.

HTH, and I'm looking forward to following inputs from others.

Isaac from TORK

[1] Sorry this is not even ROS; OpenRTM is yet another robotics
framework. http://wiki.ros.org/openrtm_aist_core
[2] https://github.com/tork-a/openrtm_tutorial
[3] http://www.ros.org/news/2014/03/announcing-a-ros-japan-users-group-meetup.html
[4] https://github.com/tork-a/live-cd
[5] http://jenkins.jsk.imi.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp:8080/job/live-cd/

--
!Happy opensource robotics!

Isaac Isao Saito (齋藤功)
Co-founder, Software Engineer
TORK (Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association, 東京オープンソースロボティクス協会)
http://opensource-robotics.tokyo.jp

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ros-sig-education/CAGvvMxav%3D3CGR2zOZTsPdyzWJd-dfsr4e1xQuZ%3D0B1cXRg7Q1A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sanford Dickert]

Marianna - 

Funnily, I just found this and had only minutes ago sent Brian an email on this very thing.

Are you available for a quick chat?  I am in London (on GMT timezone) and would love a catch up if you could.  I am happy to explain to you my mission about creating a curriculum that is going to respect the students potential all the more.

I am found here: www.whoissanford.com