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Teaching complex skills through an online robotics competition during Covid-19 pandemic

As the hands-on engineering education got severely affected by the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study discusses how to adopt the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach to teach complex engineering concepts in this tough time. In this paper, we have discussed the design of a gamified problem statement (using a robotic simulation environment called CoppeliaSim) which was used to teach complex engineering concepts like image processing, control systems, path planning, etc to undergraduate students by a pioneering initiative in engineering education. The study was implemented on 469 teams (1876 students) and explores how the use of a simulation environment impacts the overall performance of teams in completing the assigned problem statement. In addition to this, we have demonstrated the use of a leaderboard to increase learner engagement and motivation in completing the problem statement. Our work is useful to anyone seeking to use PBL to teach and/or learn complex engineering concepts.