Work in progress - using a mobile robots laboratory to teach advanced computing concepts

It is widely believed that one reason that the current generation of college students are not majoring in computing because such majors are viewed as uninteresting and not relevant. This WIP paper describes a curricular proof-of-concept project that attempts to integrate diverse computing concepts to increase and retain student interest in computing. We are developing a flexible mobile robots laboratory, not to teach introductory computing concepts but instead to teach intermediate and advanced computing topics such as networking, database management and distributed security. The essence of our approach is twofold: to provide exciting and physically-grounded projects in required intermediate-level courses, and to integrate the teaching of advanced computing topics into single courses, for example, networking with database management, and not merely defer such topics to capstone courses or projects. Such an approach is likely to pique and retain the interest of computing students. We briefly describe our curricular approach and its current status in this paper.