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News

• Congratulations to Dr. Kay for being selected as the recipient of this year's Rowan University Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching
  
• We've just completed our 6th annual Rowan University FIRST LEGO League Qualifier!! for 9 to 14-year olds. Congratulations to all the particpants!
• We ran another    workshop in June: Start Your Own Robotics Club: LEGO Mindstorms Programming for Absolute Beginners. See also our flyer.
• Congratulations to Bryant Jones for winning the 2012 STEM symposium student research competition!
• Congratulations to Nick Ilchenko, Nicholas Persiketti, Eva  Guido, and Tara Crittendon for their robotics presentation at the 2012 STEM symposium, and check out the cool article and photo from the Gloucester County Times!
  
• The Experience It! Event at SIGCSE 2012 in March was a big success with funding from Turingscraft and  The National Science Foundation.
• We're pleased that our   workshop in June: Start Your Own Robotics Club: LEGO Mindstorms Programming for Absolute Beginners was so successful!
• High School Students from Buena, Deptford, Glassboro, Millville, and Pitman who were on campus for the 2011 Rowan Sciences Day programmed an scribbler robot with IPRE fluke board to do a cool dance to that great country hit ... the Chicken Coop Shuffle! You can see the code they wrote in the Python Language with Myro extensions, or watch the video.
  
• The Robot Hoedown & Rodeo at SIGCSE 2011 in March was a big success. Thanks again to our sponsors: The National Science Foundation and iRobot Corporation.
• Watch a news report about the event on CBS 11 News in Dallas
• Look at our photo gallery
• View a pile of SIGCSE robot videos on youtube
• Watch some videos uploaded by wranglers (people who brought robots) and ranch hands (participants) of individual demos

Publications

• Jennifer S. Kay and Janet G. Moss, "Using Robots to Teach Programming to K-12 Teachers," Proceedings of FIE 2012, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference October 2012, Locally cached copy
  
  
• Douglas Blank, Jennifer S. Kay, James B. Marshall, Keith O’Hara, and Mark Russo, “Calico: A Multi-Programming-Language, Multi-Context Framework Designed for Computer Science Education.” In the Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2012, March 2012. Locally Cached Copy
  
  
• Stacey L. Montresor, Jennifer S. Kay, Michel Tokic, and Jonathan M. Summerton, “Work In Progress - Programming In A Confined Space – A Case Study In Porting Modern Robot Software To An Antique Platform.” Proceedings of FIE 2011, IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 2011. Locally Cached Copy
  
  

• Contextualized approaches to introductory computer science: the key to making computer science relevant or simply bait and switch?

  Jennifer S. Kay
  SIGCSE '11 Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, 2011. Locally Cached Copy
  
  
• Robots as Recruitment Tools in Computer Science: The New Frontier or Simply Bait and Switch?"
  Jennifer Kay
  In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation, March 2010. Locally Cached Copy
  

• Robots in the Classroom ... And the Dorm Room
  Jennifer Kay
  Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol. 25, No. 3, January 2010, pp.128-133. Winner, Best Paper Award CCSCE 2009 Locally Cached Copy
  

• From Mad Libs to Tic Tac Toe: Using Robots and Game Programming as a Theme in an Introduction to Programming Course for Non-Majors
  in Proceedings of the 22nd International FLAIRS Conference, May 2009. Locally Cached Copy
  

• Pushing Beyond Traditional School and Course Boundaries: High School and University Students Collaborate on an Interdisciplinary Project
  Adrian Rusu, Amalia Rusu, Jennifer Kay, and Hong Zhang
  Proceedings of FIE 2007: The Frontiers in Education Conference, Milwaukee, October 2007. Locally Cached Copy
  

• Getting Down & Dirty: Incorporating Homogeneous Transformations and Robot Kinematics into a Computer Science Robotics Class."
  Jennifer Kay
  Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Robots and Robot Venues, March 2007.Locally Cached Copy
  

• Two Lab Exercises for an Introductory Robotics Class
  Jennifer Kay
  AAAI Spring Symposium on Accessible Hands-on AI and Robotics Education, March 2004. Locally Cached Copy
  
  
• Teaching Robotics from a Computer Science Perspective
  Jennifer Kay
  Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 19, no. 2, December 2003. Locally Cached Copy
  
  
• Open Source Software and Computer Science Education
  Keith O'Hara and Jennifer Kay
  Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 18, no. 3, Februrary, 2003. Locally Cached Copy
  
  
• Investigating Open Source Software and Educational Robotics
  Keith O'Hara and Jennifer Kay
  Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 18, no. 3, Februrary, 2003 Locally Cached Copy

Rowan First Lego League

Visit the Rowan FLL website at http://www.rowan.edu/~firstlego where you can find photos and videos of past events and related links.

Resources

• A guide to LEGO Mindstorms NXT Resources
• Information for FIRST LEGO League Event Coordinators on how to run a successful event.
• A Gentle Introduction to Homogeneous Transformations and Robot Kinematics (suitable for use in an Introduction to Robotics class)
• Slides to accompany the Introduction to Homogeneous Transformations and Robot Kinematics document.
• A selection of papers available on the web for use in an undergraduate introduction to Robotics course. (pretty dated)
• LEGO Mindstorms RCX Patches
• Step-by-step directions, blueprints, and a parts list to help you build your own walking robot can be found on the Crawler web page.

People

Lab Director:

• Jennifer Kay

Current Students:

• Malik Ahmed
• Tara Crittenden
• Remo Coco
• Eva Guido
• Nikita Iltchenko
• Bryant Jones
• Nicholas Persicketti

Alumni

• Melissa Bingham
• Andrew Crowell
  
• Eric Cummings
• Stacey Montresor
• Geoff Myers
• Tim Sanders
• David Sorenson
• Jon Summerton
• Keith O'Hara

Videos

Old News

• Mkor Shalom Seniors programmed Shlomo the Robot to dance at a recent brown bag lunch. Watch the video, see Dr. Kay's slides, and learn more about the Klezmer music we used on the special Mkor Seniors Robots Page.

For More Information