About this Research Topic

Background

STEM education aims to teach basic principles of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to motivate students to further pursue a career in the fields of science, engineering and computer science. Robotics is a powerful tool to motivate students to work with STEM by applying problem-solving techniques in a practical project. As an inherently multidisciplinary field, robotics facilitates learning by forcing students to combine and integrate knowledge from traditionally separated disciplines. Besides improving education, researchers in technical fields have long noticed the benefits that robotics can bring to the advancement of research.

In this context, robotics challenges and competitions are an excellent way to motivate students to develop and apply knowledge acquired during classes, as well as to motivate researchers to find new solutions to real-world problems. The nature of challenges and competitions, in which different teams work towards the same goal, helps creating a focus on specific problems. A large number of robot competitions around the world are used to stimulate participants in a healthy way, leading to innovative solutions and technological advances.

The aim of this Research Topic is to disseminate the latest developments in educational robotics and competitions, focusing on teaching and research in engineering and computer science. We encourage submissions that deal with educational robotics, challenge-based robotics, and robotics competitions at different levels. Article types include original research or review articles and technical report articles.

Some topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- Educational Robotics;
- Teaching methodologies with robots;
- Robotics-based STEM education;
- Robotics competitions (physical or in simulation);
- New approaches to robotics competitions and their associated methodologies;
- Standard problems that can be used as benchmarks to evaluate and compare the performance of different approaches.

Keywords: Engineering Education; Robotics competitions, Simulation, Educational Robotics, STEM

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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