Practicing Engineering in a First-Year Student Project: MATLAB meets LEGO Mindstorms

Besides lectures of theoretical foundations, contemporary teaching and learning concepts for first semester students consider more and more practically motivated courses. In this context, a new first-year student introduction course in practical engineering is established in the first semester curriculum of Electrical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Based on a threefold learning concept, programming skills in MATLAB are taught to 309 students within a full-time block course laboratory. The students were encouraged to transfer known mathematical basics to program algorithms and real-world applications performed by 100 LEGO Mindstorms robots. Therefore a new MATLAB toolbox and twofold project tasks were developed by a small team of supervisors. Furthermore the students were supervised by over 60 tutors at 23 institutes and encouraged to create their own robotics applications. We describe how the laboratory motivates the students to act and think like engineers to solve real-world issues with limited resources. The given evaluation results show that the proposed practical course concept successfully boosts the students’ motivation, advanced their programming skills, and encourages the peer learning process.