By Benjamin Konuch
Engineering is one of the fastest-growing career fields in the world, but not all countries provide students with a pathway for engineering education. One engineering senior design team at Cedarville University is addressing this need with the development of SafeTown, an affordable, educational autonomous robot kit that can teach engineering fundamentals anywhere in the world.
The senior design team, led by Dr. Clint Kohl, senior professor of computer engineering, is the second group to work on this project. Inheriting the research and work of the previous year’s team, this group of four senior engineering students including Zachary Craig of Baldwinsville, has been tasked with developing and perfecting an actual working model that can be produced and provided to high schools and colleges for replication. The kit will be completed and ready for full production by the end of the semester.
Before the project has even been completed, SafeTown is already making impacts in engineering education opportunities. Through a Cedarville connection with the Central Asia Engineering Dentistry Medicine Institute (CAEDMI), the student-developed autonomous robot kit will soon be utilized in real classrooms across Central Asia.
SafeTown is a robot kit designed to teach engineering students the basics of working with details of electrical components and programming. The kit, based on a similar but more expensive model from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be paired with an educational curriculum developed along with the robot to guide students through the actual construction process. Then, when the robot has been assembled, it can be used on a foam map and programmed to follow instructions to move within the boundaries of the map.
“We believe this project can be used for students to find out early if their interest in engineering is something that they’ll enjoy applying in real-world scenarios,” said Benjamin Kinard, a computer engineering student and the student team leader. “That’s what this kit is designed to do.”
The design team has worked on two different versions of the SafeTown robot. The first is the junior kit designed to teach engineering basics, while the second is designed for more intensive training of students with programming experience. While the senior kit is not as far along in production as its less-complicated counterpart, the team believes that massive leaps will be taken in its design before the semester ends.
The Cedarville team is developing SafeTown to have an international reach, as the idea for the project actually came from CADEMI itself. One of the full-time faculty members of CAEDMI, Dr. Andrew Heyd, graduated with his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Cedarville University in 1999 and served as a professor of mathematics from 2002-2004. Through his connection with Kohl while at Cedarville, Heyd discussed the need for teaching resources in Asia with Kohl, and the SafeTown project was born. Through this connection, CAEDMI is in line to become the first official client of SafeTown, using the project and its curriculum to teach engineering at institutions in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia.
In addition to providing the kits for use in other countries, a version of SafeTown will also be utilized in an introductory engineering class at Cedarville to be debuted next school year and taught by Kohl. The Safe Town curriculum will be used to help incoming freshmen get early exposure to engineering concepts and better determine if the pathway is right for them.
Whether used in Ohio or in countries half a world away, SafeTown will help lead to a better future of well-equipped engineers.
