First Education Working Group Meeting

General
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Education Working Group Introductory Meeting

Hi Everyone,

A little over a week ago I proposed that we create a new ROS education working group and sent out a survey to figure out when we should meet.

Apparently the education working group is a popular idea! I got sixty-six responses from educators on almost every continent! That’s great! It means we should have enough people to break out into smaller committees and work in parallel.

Looking at the responses, early mornings PST were a preferable time! Unfortunately, that just so happens to also be when most of my meetings are already scheduled (e.g. the ROS 2 TSC meeting). I propose that we schedule our first meeting for Wednesday, 2023-08-16T15:00:00Z, and our second meeting for Wednesday, 2023-08-30T15:00:00Z. Generally, we’ll shoot for Wednesday mornings but I will have to adjust with my schedule.

Events are now on the OSRF calendar.

The agenda for the first meeting is as follows:

  • [10 min | All] Brief introductions (30s or less)
  • [10 min | Kat] Present proposed sub-projects
  • [20 min | All] Discuss sub-projects
  • [20 min | All] Create sub-project committees
    • Need a core group of 2-3 people to lead and own development under the committee. Hope is committee will grow over time.
    • We’re in the requirements generation phase! Committees should plan on creating a survey to help them gather data by the next meeting. We can integrate surveys into a single survey next meeting.
    • Committees should also plan on brainstorming lists of different approaches to solve their core question.
    • Core Platform Development (aka platform committee)
      • What does good, maintainable, open-source, content look like?
      • GOAL: Specification of the file formats and organizational structure for educational content.
        • Answer questions like: Do we use a LMS? Do we use markdown files, Latex, or something else? Do we create slides (Google, Powerpoint, Beamer, Markdown?)
        • Must address forking,
    • Semester of Robotics with ROS (aka content committee)
      • What are we going to cover, and in what order?
      • GOAL: Create a list of topics to cover ranked by importance, relevance to the most number of educators.
        • Focus should be on ROS content, but how much “introductory engineering” and theory do we need to cover? What’s the right balance?
    • Define and Build “Student Sandbox” (aka sandbox committee)
      • What would a good student sandbox look like? Do students install ROS on their machine? Get a Docker container? SSH into a pre-configured machine? How would students move from their sandbox to a real robot.
      • GOAL: Create a specification for a student sandbox that:
        • Is easy to maintain, upgrade, fork, and modify
        • Works well with the “Core Platform”
        • Is capable of supporting the “semester of robotics”
        • Can easily toggle between a simulation and arbitrary real hardware.
10 Likes
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Thank Kat for spearheading this edu effort.

I also think eventually there should be some sort of “outreach committee” to engage with how the community is using whatever’s materialized (answer questions like: who are the intended student audience? how to reach them, make them aware of content? what analytics to be measured? how to measure? how to aggregate feedback? etc…) .

Looking fwd to first meeting!!

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I also look forward to the first meeting .

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Google calendar events have been posted. I have included links to the meeting in the post.

2 Likes
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This sounds fun.

I’m quite into https://experientialrobotics.org/

It doesn’t (yet) feature ROS Welcome to Introduction to Robotics — XRP 2023.0 documentation

Assuming I can get Wifi transport working on the Pico they use in their hardware I’d be up for helping write some documentation for Linorobot2 in their docs

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This is great, Katherine.
I can’t wait to be part of this important meeting.

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We seem to be having some technical difficulties with the hangout. Please hold.

7 Likes
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I thought that I understood the time wrong actually. different time zone… just waiting

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I created a new hangout. Please join.

1 Like
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Doh. I misread it. I thought it was 5pm London.

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Hi I am waiting in the lobby. Could you took me to the meeting please.

Katherine Scott via ROS Discourse <notifications@ros.discoursemail.com>, 16 Ağu 2023 Çar, 18:33 tarihinde şunu yazdı:

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Hi Everyone,

Sorry about the Hangout issues. The short of it is that I didn’t have the permissions to let everyone into the Hangout. I will work with the foundation to correct the issue for the next meeting.

Summary:

If you missed the meeting due to technical or timezone issues don’t worry! The main goal for this meeting was to broadly organize the working group into three sub-committees. The goal for these subcommittees is to survey the broader ROS community and build a consensus on how we should address the three core areas outlined in the agenda.

Action Items

To summarize the action items, I would like the working group to organize three sub-committees that address the following issues: educational content, educational platform , and educational sandbox (see the agenda above for details). Someone please correct me if I have these screen caps out of order:

Content Committee

Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-53-26
Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-53-261920×1080 148 KB

@DLu has volunteered to organize the content committee.

Platform Committee

Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-52-19
Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-52-191920×1080 150 KB

@GlenFitton has volunteered to organize the platform committee.

Sandbox Committee

Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-54-35
Screenshot from 2023-08-16 08-54-351920×1080 150 KB

@ruffsl @jackp510 volunteered to organize the sandbox committee.

Sandbox Subcommittee organizing thread is here.

@DLu @ruffsl @GlenFitton @jackp510 can you please create a short survey to collect the contact information for the three subcommittees and work with the participants to figure out how best to collaborate (e.g. Discourse, Discord, e-mail, matrix, etc)? Do you think it would be helpful to meet between now and the next EdWG meeting?

Note Taking

Managing letting people into the meeting, taking notes, an keeping us to the agenda was a lot of work.

Would anyone like to volunteer to be the note taker for the next meeting?

Next Meeting

By the next meeting I would like to have the subcommittees organized; we can continue that organizational process in the next meeting. I would like each of the subcommittees to come up with a plan to find consensus in the ROS community about their topic area. As much as possible I would like decisions made by the committees to be data driven. With this many people, I think a survey might be helpful. Would any of the committee members be willing to draft a strawman community survey for their respective committee before the next meeting? These survey’s don’t need to polished and ready to go, just a starting point for further discussion.

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To avoid confusion - I think I had volunteered to org the Sandbox subcommittee. But happy to co-org w @ruffsl and will keep him in the loop.

2 Likes
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Can anyone please explain these three committees in a gist?
I couldn’t join the meeting due to the technical issue mentioned above and by the time it was resolved, I had to join my work meeting.

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@shahwazk see the agenda at the top of the page for a brief description.

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All attempts to join the meeting failed. However, I am interested in joining the Sandbox committee.

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I’m interested in joining the content committee any form to fill for that?

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@Davis_Ogunsina @mxenya we have a couple of volunteer committee leaders who are supposed to collect the names of committee members. It may take a few days to put that together. Don’t fret too much if it takes until the next meeting to put that together; you should be able to join during the next meeting.

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Thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate.

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@mxenya - thanks for your interest in the Sandbox committee.

Here’s the link to submit your info to join.

Feel free to PM if you have any other questions. Cheers! Jack