Concept Inventories for Quality Assurance of Study Programs in Robotics.

Robotics is gaining an importance among the subjects to be studied in scientific and engineering disciplines. However, being a quite new discipline with a high degree of inter- and trans-disciplinary aspects, the teaching community cannot rely on experience, gained by a long history of experiments. With this paper we propose means to help assess and improve study programs in robotics. The approach is based on the idea of concept inventories (CIs) and related tests to derive objective information for a comparison of student groups with each other and over time, e.g. to assess learning gain for specific measures. The approach helps to further establish quality assurance in the design of robotics study programs and equips teachers with measures for a formative assessment of their work.