Guide for instructors

Teach top robot autonomy classes while saving time and minimizing uncertainty 

Instructor benefits

Duckietown is a teaching environment for creating and delivering learning experiences in robotics and AI-related topics.

We provide a comprehensive set of tools, with “one-click”, that support your teaching efforts: hardware, software, curricula, evaluations of outcomes, and support. 

Duckietown has been developed throughout the years, starting at MIT, with the feedback of hundreds of university professors and thousands of learners of all skill levels.

Duckietown offers a pedagogical infrastructure that dramatically reduces the complexity and time needed to prepare, run, and grade hands-on robot autonomy classes.

Teaching with Duckietown

We want every student to gain a deep understanding and practical knowledge of state-of-the-art problems, the approaches to solving them, and the tools needed to get the job done.

Duckietown’s platform is designed to empower you to deliver these experiences.

Resources

Duckietown offers syllabi, lecture videos, slides, Jupyter notebook activities, exercises, remote grading infrastructure, different robots, a dedicated simulator, a software development environment, open-source autonomy code, a knowledge base, operation manuals, and access to communities for learners and instructors. 

You can access most of these resources for free and evaluate them before committing to teaching with Duckietown. In addition to technical components, we offer premium support packages for instructors and teaching assistants to minimize the stress of teaching a robotics class. 

Take a moment now to review the components of the technical platform, and do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or doubts.

The Class-in-a-box

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

The Duckietown class-in-a-box is designed to get you started quickly and painlessly, while providing broad avenues for customization as you become familiar with the provided baselines and workflows. 

Duckietown Classroom

Choose from a set of existing modules and reinforce the curriculum through the Duckietown platform, or have your students take our ready-to-go online course as a flipped classroom. 

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

Each module contains:
  • interactive activities in simulation or on hardware,
  • an exercise without a solution, to be submitted by each student.

Learning robot autonomy with real robots is better than only using simulation. 

Minimize the stress of giving a class by signing up for a Professor subscription, and get priority technical support for you and your teaching assistants, amongst other perks. 

Community-based support is always available through our Slack and Stack Overflow spaces.  

Use our online evaluation infrastructure for automated performance scoring.

(Advanced users can even build a Duckietown Autolab to automate grading through hardware evaluations).

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:

  1. As a class resource: to teach robot autonomy courses in a traditional university setting, both as a standalone Duckietown course or as support to existing curricula;

  2. As a flipped classroom: where students watch the “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” massive open online course from home, and you use the class time to work through the hands-on learning activities;

  3. As an experimental platform: where the hardware and software are used as the laboratory component of another class, or for doing research.

About the community

When you bring Duckietown to your institution, your students will be joining a 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.

You can read interviews to Professors, students and professionals in our “people of Duckietown” blog.

Crowd watching AI olympics

Instructor: first steps

Want to start teaching with Duckietown? 

  1. Check out the instructor manual;
  2. Try the student experience in simulation;
  3. Reach out for a demo-kit discount code.

If you already have a Duckiebot, Duckiedrone, and/or Duckietown and are looking for instructions to start building and setting up your working environment: 

Reach out for additional information

Not sure what fits best your particular use case, or need a formal quote? For any questions or doubts do not hesitate to reach out.