Design of TTUbot: a modular learning platform for integration into engineering curriculum

Attracting, educating, and retaining new engineering students can be a challenge. Engineering education should appeal to students and engage them in order to produce innovative engineers. Keeping up with today´s technology advancement pace requires an enhancement in engineering education. In order to meet this goal, a program has been designed to address a more hands-on oriented engineering program with the introduction of a system that could be viewed from different perspectives that consists of loosely coupled modules. Each module reflects light on a topic studied in the classroom putting it into context of a real-world application. Moreover, it help students transfer knowledge among many of the courses within the engineering curricula. Based on this program, and by closely observing current experiments conducted in the engineering program, a fully modular learning platform has been developed. The modular learning platform consists of groups of modules that address a wide range of engineering backgrounds. Each group addresses material taught in certain laboratory or class. Supplemented with this system, students would be able to disengage an existent module, design a module to achieve a similar functionality, and test their design by integrating it into the system. Future work focus on incorporating the system in the engineering program at TTU in order to assess its effectiveness