Line Maze Robot Training Course for the Senior High School Students

A line maze robot training course, which contains the hardware circuit implementation, firmware programming skills and the shortest path algorithm, is presented in this paper. The training course is used for vocation senior high school teachers and students. The major topic for students is to develop the proper firmware programming to achieve the better performance and students are encouraged to pass the small contest in the end of the workshop. The low-cost educational platform is easily by the economically disadvantaged students. Students, who join the workshop can learn the basic C language, the firmware programming skills for microcontrollers, the concept of the shortest path algorithm for line maze robot, just spend less $40 USD to buy the robots. The contributions of this training course are as follows: 1) studying the hardware implementation knowledge, 2) developing microcontroller-related firmware programming skills, 3) learning motion control skills of the line maze robot, and 4) learning line-maze solving algorithms. Few students, who join this training workshop and learn the related hardware, firmware and algorithm, can find the shortest path form source to target in the line map. The feedback of the most students shows that the training course gives them the motivation to actively learn the necessary practical skills to design the firmware programming to guide the line maze robot.