The Micro-Rato contest: a popular approach to improve self-study in electronics and computer science

Robotic competitions for students have been around for more than two decades. Although the benefits of these competitions can be exploited at various levels of education, recent examples have been following a trend towards higher complexity. In order to bring the pedagogical advantages of robotics competitions down to a level where they can be exploited by undergraduate and high school students, a somewhat different strategy is presented in this paper. Since 1995, the authors have been organising the Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro, a competition of small autonomous and mobile robots. This paper provides an overview of the contest, describing the strategy followed by the organisers, the rules and technical specifications, as well as a brief profile of some of the robots.