Labs

The purpose of the COGS 300 labs is to give people an experience of building cognitive systems (robots in particular). This is in contrast to learning goals that are highly abstract, conceptual, simulated, or non-physical. The pedagogical thrust is that having embodied experiences teaches a fundamentally different kind of thing than can be learned through memorization, conceptual reasoning, etc. All those are important too, but that is not what the labs are for.

The labs have been designed to take students through a journey from barely knowing how to code, to building fully-autonomous robotic agents in a few short months. This can be an intimidating task for many students. It is common for students to believe that they are not very good at coding or cannot possibly learn to build circuits. Sometimes, they believe this right until the end of the course, when its clear to the instructor that they have progressed immensely.

Using the Labs Teaching Notes

The teaching notes will include instructor TODOs for the labs, markdown slides that you can use/modify/adapt for your lab, and concept notes.