Meet MIRTE - Using Affordable Open Science Robots in Engineering Education

With the advances in robotics applications in society, it has become imperative to equip engineering students with practical robotics skills relevant to their field. However, incorporating robots into higher education poses challenges, particularly regarding cost, obsolescence, and maintenance. This workshop introduces engineering educators to the MIRTE Pioneer, an affordable, open-science, modular, mobile educational robot designed for use in upper secondary and university education settings. The Pioneer is part of a family of MIRTE educational robots for use in primary school to university developed at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. By being a truly multi-purpose, open science robot, with all its material available as open source, open hardware and open educational resources, MIRTE is a community where educators are not tied down to a specific goal or purpose and can endlessly adapt and expand MIRTE for their own needs and share their resources. This allows educators to provide students with hands-on experience in designing, programming, and electronics as they see fit. The workshop aims to introduce participants to MIRTE and explore its use in their own education and, by doing so, contribute to an international community for open robotics education. It consists of a combination of hands-on experimentation with the MIRTE robot and the participant's own laptop, combined with group discussions, in which participants will explore the potential of integrating the MIRTE Pioneer into their educational environments.