Robot as a Service in Computing Curriculum

This paper reports the newly designed first computer science and first programming course CSE101 developed and taught at Arizona State University, and disseminated to many other universities, to address the enrollment crisis as reported by ACM CS Curriculum Committee Review Task Force in 2008. The course teaches the basic computer science and engineering concepts and gives the students the first programming experience through robotics programming. The initial curriculum and the ongoing improvement of the course are presented. The course started with its experiment environment using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, Visual Programming Language, and Lego Mind storms robots. The environment is extended to a Web-based programming environment and Intel architecture-based robots.