I strongly believe that engineering education in general must be both multicultural and multidisciplinary since the first year; this becomes even truer if we want to have new leaders capable of tackling the advanced challenges our society is providing us.
My goal as educator is to nurture the new “Renaissance Engineer” of the third millennium, intended as an old new- model of engineer, highly inter-disciplinary and not so much focused on high specialization; more open to cultural fertilizations and not strictly oriented towards the technical knowledge, but able to use in design the investigation and synthesis tools provided by the study of Nature and of humanities.
Robotics and Bioengineering are the perfect background disciplines to achieve this goal, as they are both strongly multidisciplinary and extremely broad (horizontal) disciplines, de facto unifying the so-called “two cultures”, Science and Humanities. With their multidisciplinary and active characteristics, Robotics and Bioengineering better prepares the students to tackle the global challenges they will face during their life and future careers.
With my Laurea Degree (equivalent to Bachelor+Master) in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Bioengineering, my PhD in Biomedical Robotics, and my activities as associate professor of robotics, I am confident to be qualified in teaching a wide variety of courses related to Robotics, Bioengineering, Mechatronics, and Medical (Rehabilitation) Engineering, as well as more general courses about Scientific Presentation and Scientific Writing.
As an educator, I am strongly emphasizing active learning during all my courses at all levels, with activities organized in groups, discussion both in class as well as at home, and practical problem solving. I want to expose my students to simplified versions of real-case problems by using bioengineering and robotics as a teaching tool, so that they need to apply their theoretical knowledge to find a practical solution. This approach – as testified by the abundant literature on learning and learning technologies – fixes and strengthens their understanding of the subjects, in particular the most basic ones, such as mathematics and physics. Moreover, this active learning method allows the students to learn how to work in team as well as individually; it also strengthens their ability to uncover and solve problems, stimulates their creative thinking, and improves their communication skills, both written and oral.
At undergraduate level, for example in my courses such as Fundamentals of Robotics, I can show the students the basic concepts for several disciplines (mathematics, physics, electronics, and mechanics, just to mention a few) as well as their practical implementations in real life. My research experience in Robotics and Bioengineering also allows me to present what the current basic topics can lead to; I always emphasize concrete examples and tangible demonstrations, and whenever possible I give examples from my own background. The use of practical Robotics and Bioengineering as teaching aids naturally guides the students to master the basic academic skills; moreover, they act as tremendous motivational agents, as the students are both intrigued and fascinated by the possibilities that are waiting for them in the senior years. I also think it is important to avoid a mechanistic approach, and instead it is important to develop the intuition behind mathematical and programming tools and a good sense of why and when they work. This is why I also liked more practical courses, such as Mechanical Engineering Lab, Mechatronics Lab, or Engineering Practice, and I would like in due time to teach them, too.
At graduate level I can build on the skills learned during the undergraduate years, and tackle more advanced topics. It is very important at this stage to guide the students to develop the ability to frame a problem and to look at it in new ways. At this level I can propose more complex courses on robotics (such as the course on “Advanced Topics in Robots and Systems” I am currently teaching in Waseda University), as well as to explore new ways of teaching. Another key issue is the combination of tools and insights from different fields, which are often separated by disciplinary boundaries.
For example, in the past years I have been running a journal club (i.e. a regular meeting in which all participants take turn in explaining a paper related to the participants’ research) with graduate students, PhD students, and post-doc researchers. This regular meeting was extremely well accepted by the students, so I proposed to transform it into a regular course. During this course (currently named “Analysis and discussion of papers on advanced robotics”) both master and PhD students read, analyse, and review recent papers on advanced robotics (with its widest interpretation). This allows the students to keep track and stay updated about what other groups in the world are doing, and learn new methodologies and ideas to be applied to their own research. The uniqueness of this course and its success among the students are testified by the fact that I always have several unregistered students, and some students are taking the course again even if they do not need it for the academic credits, because every year the contents of the course are new and the students can keep learning new things.
At all levels I always encourage the students to explore original research for final projects, after completing introductory assignments and paper reviews. This model has proven extremely successful for me in the past as an incubator for new ideas, and it is very beneficial to students, in particular at PhD level, in obtaining publications and experience in areas not directly related to their PhD research. The process of solving real-world problems through designing and controlling mechatronic systems has always inspired me in both classes and research, and I look forward to sharing this excitement with students.
One common problem when teaching to people coming from different nations, especially at undergraduate level, is that their ability to understand English, and to express themselves in a language which is not their mother tongue, can be limited. To overcome this problem and simplify the learning process of the students I have been videorecording all my lectures, and made them available to the student for off-line checking. In this way the students are able to repeat my lectures over and over when something was not clear, thus improving their understanding. In due time I plan to use the “flipped classroom” model, so that the students can check the lectures in advance at home, and we can use the class time for discussion and exercises. In this way I can spend more time interacting with my students instead of just lecturing them.
