Robotics and intelligent systems for social and behavioral science undergraduates

  • Authors:

  • Tom Armstrong

  • Affiliations:

  • Wheaton College, Norton, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this article, we share our experiences offering an original course entitled Intelligent Systems targeted at undergraduate social and behavioral science students. Intelligent Systems provides a rigorous introduction to robotics and surveys selected topics in artificial intelligence. This course is tailored to students with little mathematical background and no programming experience. We offer best practices and information from successful course components and ideas for tailoring course content to social and behavioral science students. The motivation for this course comes from the wide interdisciplinary appeal of robotics and artificial intelligence. They have been leveraged to improve recruitment to the major and to expose students in other disciplines to computational thinking. However, no offerings of CS0 that exclusively cater to the large social and behavioral science population are available that focus on intelligent systems. Robots and AI systems are affordable and accessible to this group of students. We propose our solution to this problem and argue for offering multiple, interdisciplinary CS0 offerings.