Student projects at Mobots/Learn-ge

The rapid progression of AI tools is questioning educational programs. What concepts about AI should be present in the educational programs and at which age? How can we educate young generation to AI concepts, to prepare them to their professional and social life in 5, 10 or 15 years?

The answer to these questions requires a theoretical analysis but also to explore some practice in the classes. This project aims at approaching the second path (practice in classes) by using an educational mobile robot, Thymio, developed at EPFL and largely available in schools.

The goal of the project is to develop a software platform that allow to explore in an interactive way some forms of learning algorithms applied to simple neural networks, and the approach to decision trees.

This platform can be used by the teacher to explain the concepts in a frontal way or can be used by the students to explore the principles. For both situations the application will focus on the visualization of the learning process.

The project will include both the application development and tests with teachers / students in real classroom setups.

iFixit is a leader in the area of product repair. They provide guides, parts, support and they collaborate with companies to improve both repairability of product as well as support to users who want to repair a product.

On the other hand MOBOTS has designed with some other partners the Thymio robot that is easy to repair, but has no clear official support for it.

This project aims creating a collaborative project with iFixit to create a Thymio product page, with all aspects related to this page, with the goal of having an iFixit supported page. This collaboration will also involve Mobsya, the non-profit association manufacturing Thymio and able to provide replacement parts. The project will allow the student to discover this type of framework, the standards and quality checks in this domain, as well as the full procedure for the creation of a product page.

ICT is a sector with a growing environmental impact. Aa a user, the choice of hardware and software is key to reduce our individual impact on the environment. This becomes even more important if this choice is done at an institutional level. Moreover, despite hardware seems to have a much bigger environmental impact that software, software choices impact the hardware life duration, which is the most important factor in the life cycle analysis of the hardware.

This project aims at studying the impact of software choices starting from a simple case-study: word processing. Microsoft word is now a huge piece of software with a functionality that has not evolved a lot since decades. Moreover we know, in academia, alternatives such as latex that perform even better on large documents. The study will look for a methodology to compare several options, keeping a life cycle analysis perspective.