Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Virtualizing FIRST for Improved Recruitment of Students for Computer Science and Engineering

Abstract

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an international program aimed at inspiring high school students to pursue careers in science and technology through a yearly challenge in which teams of students design and build robots to compete against other teams from all over the world. The teams engage in an intense six-week effort to build a robot to do a specified task such as to scoop up a bunch of beach balls and put them into a large container. The robots are large and must operate both autonomously and with radio control. The contest itself has the atmosphere of a professional wrestling tournament, complete with a master of ceremonies and teams and cheerleaders in costume and often with painted faces and hair. All this has proven to be an effective draw for recruiting students to engineering and to a lesser extent to computer science. The College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina (USC) is sponsoring an unusual team composed of students from several high schools. Over time, and as interest grows to a sustainable level, the USC team will spin off teams to the participating high schools, further increasing the pool of students interested in science and technology.

One recurring problem is that the robot software cannot be tested and debugged until after the mechanical and electrical subsystems are functional and nearly complete; hence, the programmers have minimal time, at the end of the development period, to work with the robot and they encounter great difficulty and frustration in developing and optimizing their code. Implementing the robot and the contest environment in a simulator such as Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio allows the students to develop their software and hardware concurrently. This greatly improves individual team performance in the competition and provides students with increased exposure to software design, which should result in increased numbers of students entering into computing careers.

1. Introduction

Each year in January, the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) organization releases the rules and specifications for its annual Robotics Competition. Teams of high school students have six weeks from the time the challenge is issued until the finished robot must be shipped to the contest site. While the competition is to build a functional and competitive robot, FIRST’s main objective is to inspire high school students to pursue careers in science and technology—the robotics competition is simply the vehicle for achieving this goal. In this regard FIRST has been extraordinarily successful. Studies show, see Table 1, that FIRST alumni major in engineering at about seven times the rate of other high school graduates and they major in computer science at about twice the rate of other high school graduates2.

Although having students major in computer science at twice the average rate of high school graduates in general is an excellent result, it pales in comparison to the seven-fold increase in engineering majors. We believe that a large part of the reason for this difference is a result of the manner in which the robot is developed. A team begins by developing the operational concept

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Bowles, J., & Buchhaults, C., & Griffith, D. (2009, June), Virtualizing First For Improved Recruitment Of Students In Computer Science And Engineering Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5345