Building Better Robots and Better Teams

When Siobhan Oca first came to Duke as an engineering doctoral student interested in medical robotics, she discovered a passion for robotics education.

Through a Bass Connections grant and the support of her department, Oca seized the chance to develop and teach an introductory course on robotics. With the mentorship of two experienced faculty members, she thought deeply about what she wanted students to get out of each session and what she wanted them to take away at the end of the term. Integrating more project-based work would help students succeed, she believed. 

After graduating, Oca joined Duke’s faculty as assistant professor of the practice in mechanical engineering and materials science. She now directs her department’s master’s programs, including a new master’s program in robotics and autonomy.

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Continuing to hone her skills in course design and instruction, she took part in the Collaborative Project Courses Faculty Fellows Program, a peer learning community for Duke faculty. She had taught a graduate course in medical robotics that she felt could be improved. “It just didn’t have enough structure, and the teams were kind of hit or miss,” Oca recalls. “The goal of doing that deep dive with other faculty was to understand how to add structure to a project that also benefits from a lack of structure.”

Today, Oca teaches four courses, three of which she considers to be collaborative project courses. 

In her Introduction to Medical Robotics course, for example, students undertake three projects together. The first project builds students’ ability to understand a problem within surgery or medicine, which involves communication with stakeholders. Next, students create pitch decks about their product ideas, which could be aimed at venture capitalists. The final project involves understanding how to craft an effective research experiment design.

“I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all collaborative project course design,” Oca says. Her undergraduate course on Introduction to Robotics, for instance, begins with an individual project. Because students come from many different disciplines, starting with individual projects ensures that all students gain core competencies in robotics. Then when the students join project teams for the second half of the semester, they’re much less likely to default into familiar roles. They can work more collaboratively.

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As teams get started, they propose their own grading rubrics. “I give them a little bit of scaffolding based on what previous groups have done and what success looks like,” Oca notes, “but the idea is that at the end of the semester, when it comes down to crunch time, they’re working on objectives that they think are meaningful because they defined them in the rubric.” 

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The Intro to Robotics students have pulled off “some really cool projects,” Oca says. In one of them that she’s especially proud of, a student confessed that she’d been terrified to take the course. “She said, ‘I have a math background, but I’ve never done engineering. I don’t know that I can do this.’” But that’s the whole point, Oca emphasizes: “the class is there to teach you.”

The math student built her fundamental skills through the first part of the course, and she ended up being a key contributor on her team. She and her teammates designed a device, attached to a robotic arm, which could produce a consistent amount of frosting for baked goods. They used a vision algorithm to identify if the item was a donut, a muffin or a cookie, and they automatically changed the frosting pattern for each type.

Some teams might have stopped there, but these students came to class on the last day with 55 baked goods for everyone, all frosted by their robot. “It was nuts,” Oca says proudly. “The amount of time it took them … I could have cried. That says something about the passion they felt about the project, and the amount of pride they had in what they’d done.”

Oca sees that kind of shared pride often in team-based learning. When students build something together, she says, their investment deepens and their confidence grows. “It’s really special,” Oca concludes. “I think teaching students how to work with others is one of the essential skills we can teach them while they’re here at Duke.”

Main image: Oca (second from left) cheers as her students successfully demonstrate their robotics project. (Photo: Maddie Go, Pratt School of Engineering)