Guide for instructors

Use Duckietown to teach, learn, and do research.

I am an instructor

The Duckietown platform provides a rich environment to teach undergraduate or graduate-level classes on robotics and AI-related subjects.

Vision

We want every student in the world to have access to learning experiences that provide a deep understanding and practical knowledge of state-of-the-art problems, approaches to solving them, and the tools of the job.

Duckietown empowers instructors to deliver these experiences by offering a well-tested, complete set of materials that dramatically reduce the complexity and time needed to prepare and run classes.

The “class-in-a-box” experience

Setting up a state-of-the-art robot autonomy class is hard and time-consuming.

The Duckietown class-in-a-box is designed to be a one-click solution to modern robot autonomy education.

The class-in-a-box provides the following experience:

Build your curriculum

Choose from a set of existing modules and reinforce the curriculum through the Duckietown platform.

(Optional) Customize the modules to your needs

Modify the slides, activities, and exercises to emphasize what you like.

Choose your teaching activities

Each module contains:

interactive activities in simulation or on hardware,
an exercise without a solution, to be submitted by the student.

Grade the homework exercises

Use our evaluation infrastructure on the cloud for automated performance scoring.

(Optional) Engage students in projects

We provide mechanisms for you to guide your students to create more complex projects in teams.

One platform for many experiences

The Class-in-a-box can be used in several ways:

As a class resource: to teach robot autonomy classes.
As an experimental platform: where the hardware and software are used as the laboratory component of another class. Learn more about using Duckietown for research here.
As a flipped classroom: where the students watch the Duckietown “Self-Driving Cars” massive open online course from home, and you use the class time to work through the learning activities.

About the community

When you bring Duckietown to your institution, your students will be joining a fun, global community, which includes opportunities for worldwide collaboration and competition.

We offer an instructors-only community too, to share experiences and resources on teaching with Duckietown!

Instructor next steps

Start teaching with Duckietown in three steps:

Get a classroom kit, containing all the hardware you need to get started;
Learn about how other instructors are using Duckietown to teach;
Check the available classroom resources.

For any questions or doubts, do not hesitate to reach out!