A Multimedia Environment for Supporting the Teaching of Robotics Systems (original) (raw)

This paper aims at describing the building of an educational system for teaching and learning robotics systems. Actually, multimedia resources are used to construct a virtual laboratory where users are able to utilize functionalities of a robotic arm, by moving and clicking the mouse without caring about the detailed internal robot operation. The engineering students are its target public. The final product was a Virtual Laboratory prototype of a teaching and learning environment that can be used to study robotics topics, to manipulate a virtual robot and to communicate with a real one. It socializes the students' synthesis based on questioning and contributions, clarifying doubts and posing new questions about robotic systems. First, this paper introduces the metaphor of Virtual Laboratory used in the application. Next, it is described the Graphical and Multimedia Environment approach, an interactive graphic user interface with a 3D environment for simulation. Design and implementation issues of the real-time interactive multimedia learning system, which supports the W3C SMIL standard for presenting the real-time multimedia teaching material on the class, are used and described. With content-sharing and interactive capabilities provided by this system and its tools, students can devote themselves on the learning process just as they are in the traditional face-to-face classes. Finally, we mention the conclusions and possible future works from this research.