Assignment Topic Exploration

In this assignment you will work in groups of five. The groups have been created randomly in Canvas across university boarders, and you can check under the People and then change to tab Groups. The name of the groups for this assignment is "WASP-AS1-M2 X"  where X is 1-14.  The first person listed is responsible for initiating contacts with the others and start the work. You can also find you group by using the Groups tab in the left hand menu in Canvas under Dashboard and Courses.

The wasp-sweden Slack workspace is a good way to communicate. You should also be able to use Canvas by going to the Inbox (under Groups and Calendar in the left hand menu) and compose a mail to the members. After you have selected the course you want to communicate with you can simply start typing the names of people and Canvas will expand to all people that match.

Your task as a group is to study four topics in the group  and produce a number of deliverables (see further down). At the end, each of you should be able to give a basic presentation about each of the topics to show that you meet the requirement of having basic knowledge in these areas.

Topics

The topics are described by the pages linked below. 

1. Modeling and Simulation
2. Control
3. Verification
4. Motion Planning

Deliverables

• For each of the 4 topics
  • One 2h "teaching sessions" where the "student teacher" of a topic transfers the knowledge to the rest of the group. The sessions should be planned and announced so that the course teachers (Patric, Bo, Christian, Gustaf or Juan Carlos) can listen in unannounced on some of them. These should be posted in this schedule 
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I40vsLhElb8X1tRN8WetnCvmFWVOsV4zj7q3ZKsXFrA Links to an external site.
  • We encourage the use of flipped classroom techniques, where some material is prepared before and read by "students" to prepare for the learning session, but we leave decision of the format to you.
  • We suggest that you you your group's Homepage in Canvas to collaborate on this assignment so that the material is available to the course teach as well seamlessly. This page provides some info about the group Links to an external site..
• Presentation material for a 10-15 min lecture for each of the above topics that covers what you consider to be the important aspects in that topics. The presentation should include pointers to the sources of information that you used.
  • When possible the lecture should include a small demo of the main concepts, tools, etc in this topic. Feel free to reuse whatever you find on the material pages in this module and elsewhere.
  • The lecture should cover the basic material that you believe that everyone should know about the topic. One of the key things to discuss is why is this topic important to know about?
  • Connected to the presentation there should be a set of questions (to ask the audience) that captures the most important aspects of the topic. 
• One document that states
  • how the work was distributed with an explicit mentioning of who prepared what topic and signed by all that the group believes has contributed fairly to the work. An evaluation of what you think of this form of learning.

Suggested way to work

Given that there are four topics and the groups consist of five people you can put more people on some topic. We leave it to you to do this planning You would typically  prepare the lecture of the topics individually or in pairs and then present this to the other members of the group in 2h sessions. This would allow the "students" to give feedback on the lecture and material at the same time as they get to know the topic and the material so that in the end everyone has reached the goal of broad knowledge in these topics.

At the examination session

• For each topic
  • a random person among all attending students gives the 10-15 min lecture, i.e. everyone should be able to deliver all the lectures to show that they have met the goals. 
  • a discussion follows with the other groups including looking at the questions prepared.
    • Was the most important aspects covered in the lecture?
    • Did you cover the same aspects in the presentations?
    • Did the questions test the same things?
    • Did the presentations provide the knowledge needed to answer the questions?

Answers to some questions asked

• Q: Why do we have 2h teaching sessions when we only have to prepare a 10-15min presentation for each topic?
  • A: The 2h session is where you (start to?) transfer your knowledge of the topic to the other students. This might contain more material than what makes it to the 10-15min final presentation . At the end of the assignment all in the group can deliver that 10-15min presentation and actually understand what they say, not just repeat the words of the teacher in the group or read the slide notes. This will take more than 10-15min.

Answers to some expected questions

• Q: We would like to pick some other topics within control and decision making than the provided. Can we?
  • A: Sure, no problem as long as your group covers the four topics above as well and that everyone in the groups agree to learn about the additional topics that you add in addition to the mandatory ones. That is, we do not allow someone to go off on their own.
• Q: No one in my group wants to study topic X. Can we skip that?
  • A: No.
• Q: We have become fewer than five in our group. Can we skip some topic?
  • A: No, but we acknowledge that you do not have as much time at your hands and will take that into account in our assessment.