Applied social robotics—building interactive robots with LEGO mindstorms

Abstract

Teaching Social Robotics is a requiring and challenging task due to the interdisciplinary of this research field. We think that it can not be taught in a solely theoretical manner. To help students to gain more interest in the topic and to foster their curiosity we restructured a paper club like lecture to create a bridge between a theoretical topic and practical applications. This paper describes our approach to create a lecture covering theory, methods and how to transfer those to applied informatics. Described is the given theoretical input and how students learn to transfer these to a robot they build on their own.We also evaluate how the new structure was accepted and what lessons can be learned for this lecture style.