Facilitating a Hands-On Approach to Open and Modular Engineering Projects through Software Design and Data Collection

Abstract

Engineering and computer science education at the high school level is almost exclusively centered around questions that have documented solutions. Though there are benefits to pursuing these types of problems, allowing students the opportunity to tackle open questions without a known solution can aid in the development of essential skills within academic research, due to the exploratory nature of these efforts. While students may find hands-on, discovery-oriented experiences through extracurricular activities, such as robotics clubs, they are rarely given the opportunity to apply knowledge in engineering and science to open problems, as well as larger projects. Contributing to a modular component of a project with a larger scope and collaborating within a research group are both skills that can enhance education within engineering. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of elementary problem solving and programming to a larger interdisciplinary project, with a focus on computer vision and control theory. We document the creation of a pointwise video annotation software that generates a dataset for Tracking Any Point (TAP) class of computer vision models. This software facilitates future research within computer vision and localization for controls and robotics, offering a more streamlined approach to data collection.