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Duckietown Summber School 2017
The first Duckietown Summer School aims at training potential instructors and teaching assistants in future Duckietown courses. Since Duckietown is project-based learning, teaching assistants and mentors are one of the most important resources to make a successful Duckietown course. We believe that such training is a valuable learning experinece for students' skills of problem solving, team work, and leadership. We are happy to have individuals from Korea, Indonesia, and Taiwan in the first Duckietown Summer School. All materials are available as open source, and the hope is that others in the community will adopt the platform for education and research. The first Duckietown Summer School held in National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan on July 17-19, 2017.

The Supervisors
The summer school is overseen by experienced Duckietown instructors, who initiated Duckietown.

Link: http://duckietown.mit.edu/outreach.html

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT 2.166: Where it all started! The first Duckietown class was at MIT in 2016

National Chiao Tung University The "first branch of Duckietown" was started in 2016 in NCTU led by Prof Nick Wang

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago - Matthew Walter's graduate class at TTIC

ETH Zurich - Frazzoli and Censi's graduate class at ETH Zurich

University de Montreal - Graduate class taught by Paull at U de M

The Participants
The participants will be the future Duckietown instructors and teaching assistants, and support the following upcoming courses around the world. We have 20-25 participants in the first Duckietown Summer School.

Chosun University, Korea - Prof. Woosuk Sung's course

Petra Christian University, Indonesia - Prof. Resmana Lim's Mobile Robot Design Course

National Tainan Normal University, Taiwan - Prof. Jen-Jee Chen's Vehicle to Everything (V2X) Course.

Yuan Zhu University, Taiwan - Prof. Kan-Lin Hsiung's Control course

National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan - Future teaching assistants in the undergraduate course "Creative Software Project" led by Prof. Nick Wang in Fall 2017.

National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan - Prof. Yon-Ping Chen's Dynamic system simulation and implementation

National Taichung First Senior High School, Taiwan - Outreach for very young Duckietown engineers (high school students)

Program
The first Duckietown Summer School is held in National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan on July 17-19, 2017. There are 8 sections, and the detail of each section is here .

Professional Training - The 3-day course includes both hardware, such as Duckiebot assembly, soldering of PWM, 3D printing, as well as software developments: Robot Operation System (ROS), Python, Jupyter Notebook, and OpenCV. We will also cover the priniciples and processing steps of autonomous lane following.

Learning by Doing - Each section will include a 15-20 minute lecture, followed by hand-on section to finish a few specific tasks.

Evaluation - Each participant needs to finish the tasks in each section, and forms small group for final presentation (5 minute spotlight and a live demo or video.

The Organizing Committee: Student-Initialed, Student-Run
The first Duckietown Summer School is run by the experienced Duckietown teaching assistants.

Q & A

- Do I get a certificate (or official credit) after I finish the summer school?
Yes, the summer suchool is officially supported by NCTU. Each student needs to complete the evaluations in each section and final presentation. NCTU students will obtain 1 official credit, and non-NCTU students will receive a certificate from the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), NCTU.

- What's the prerequisites?
Each participant needs to bring a laptop, which will become your Duckietop using our provided VirtualBox image. Basic knowledge of Ubuntu, git, python are suggested by not required. You can see some useful tutorials here, or even get started early by self-learning!

* VirtualBox Installation

* Basic Skills

- Should I prepare my own hardware?
No, we will prepare all hardwares for each participant. We are happy to provide where to buy the parts. The cost of a Duckiebot is approximate 150 USD.

- Can I bring a Duckiebot home?
The assembled Duckiebot will stay in NCTU for teaching purposes. We have limited Duckiebots that will support international Duckietown instructors for teaching. You could bring a duckie home for free!

- Can I participate the summer school? What's the expenses for each participant?
Due to limited hardware, we are not able to host more participants. Nevertheless, you are welcome to participate the Duckietown courses in the world! No registration fee this year! The first Duckietown Summer School is supported by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the System Engineering Education project, and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

Reference and Links:
L. Paull, J. Tani, H. Ahn, J. Alonso-Mora, L. Carlone, Y. Chen, C. Choi, S.-Y. Liu, M. Novitzky, J. Pazis, G. Rosman, V. Varricchio, H.-C. Wang, D. Yershov, M. Benjamin, S. Karaman, E. Frazzoli, D. D. Vecchio, D. Rus, J. P. How, J. Leonard, H. Zhao, & A. Censi (Accepted). Duckietown: an Open, Inexpensive and Flexible Platform for Autonomy Education and Research. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2017), Singapore. paper

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