Guide for instructors

Leverage the Duckietown infrastructure to deliver engaging learning experiences that provide students with marketable skills

Instructor benefits

Duckietown is first of all a teaching environment for delivering higher education learning experiences on robotics and AI-related subjects.

Validated on thousands of students in hundreds of universities worldwide, Duckietown offers a continuously maintained, complete, pedagogical infrastructure that dramatically reduces the complexity and time needed for you to prepare, run, and grade 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.

Build your curriculum

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.

(Optional) Customize the modules to your needs

Modify the slides, learning 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 each student.

(Optional) Get the hardware

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

(Optional) Get a Duckietown Professor subscription

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.

Grade the homework exercises

Use our online evaluation infrastructure for automated performance scoring.

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

(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 courses in a traditional university setting, both as a standalone Duckietown course or as support to existing curricula;
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;
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.

Instructor: first steps

Want to start teaching with Duckietown?

Try it in simulation, for free;
Try it with real robots (first-time instructor demo discounts available);
Reach out for a quote and let us help you set your class up.

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