Project dates and role
The project ran from July to August 2013, while Dr. Costilla Reyes was a graduate research assistant at the University of North Texas (UNT). The Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program, funded by the National Science Foundation under program solicitation NSF 11-509, seeks to involve high school teachers of science, technology, engineering, computer and information science, and mathematics (STEM) in engineering research. Teachers spend the summer in a university lab, and Dr. Costilla Reyes supported the teachers he worked with as they designed, built, and documented a project. In July 2013 the teachers’ posters were displayed outside UNT’s library alongside those of the other RET participants.
What the teachers’ project investigated
The teachers’ project, “Cooperation of Autonomous NXT Robots Using Bluetooth Wireless Technology,” asked how two LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots could work together over a Bluetooth link. A lead robot followed a line on the floor using a light sensor, which reports how bright the surface beneath it is, and sent instructions to a follower robot that followed the same route. The poster lists teachers Elizabeth Freeman (Frisco ISD) and Jesse Bell (Dallas ISD), with Dr. Kamesh Namuduri as faculty mentor and Omar Costilla Reyes as graduate student. The report and a companion poster are archived in the UNT Digital Library, where Dr. Costilla Reyes is credited as research assistant.
Findings and teaching context
The report’s abstract in the UNT Digital Library identifies the sensitivity of the light sensor and the NXT-G programming environment as the factors that shape how closely the follower robot tracks the lead robot, and the authors propose adjusting the rate of Bluetooth messages to improve communication between the robots. The project gave the teachers a hands-on cycle of design, building, and documentation, which is the purpose of the RET program. The RET placement was one of several education roles Dr. Costilla Reyes held at UNT in 2013. In June and July he assisted at the university’s RoboCamp, Xbox game-programming camp, and Android AppCamp, project-based summer programs intended to encourage middle and high school students to study STEM fields, and in 2013 he gave a live demonstration of autonomous robots using vision and proximity sensors at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.