Teaching Software Engineering through Robotics

This paper presents a newly-developed robotics programming course and reports the initial results of software engineering education in robotics context. Robotics programming, as a multidisciplinary course, puts equal emphasis on software engineering and robotics. It teaches students proper software engineering – in particular, modularity and documentation – by having them implement four core robotics algorithms for an educational robot. To evaluate the effect of software engineering education in robotics context, we analyze preand post-class survey data and the four assignments our students completed for the course. The analysis suggests that the students acquired an understanding of software engineering techniques and principles.