Case Studies for Education in Robotics: From Serious Games to "Technology to Teach Technology" Platforms

This paper describes a specific perspective on developing case studies related to education in robotics. The proposed framework intends to support students learning how to develop distributed software applications through functionality composition. The multi-agent approach is used as a test bed for case studies development. It tries to stress the role of the application development platform in creating rich simulations, giving students the possibility to express their goals with clarity, and creating suitable application architectures to achieve their goals. The presented roadmap describes three "Technology to Teach Technology" platforms that support distributed application development. The last section of the paper gives the structure of a specific case study in mobile robotics, along with the Presage2 multi-agent platform.