With the advances in robotics applications in society, it has become imperative to equip engineering students with practical robotics skills relevant to their field. However, incorporating robots into higher education poses challenges, particularly regarding cost, obsolescence, and maintenance. This workshop introduces engineering educators to the MIRTE Pioneer, an affordable, open-science, modular, mobile educational robot designed for use in upper secondary and university education settings. The Pioneer is part of a family of MIRTE educational robots for use in primary school to university developed at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. By being a truly multi-purpose, open science robot, with all its material available as open source, open hardware and open educational resources, MIRTE is a community where educators are not tied down to a specific goal or purpose and can endlessly adapt and expand MIRTE for their own needs and share their resources. This allows educators to provide students with hands-on experience in designing, programming, and electronics as they see fit.
The workshop aims to introduce participants to MIRTE and explore its use in their own education and, by doing so, contribute to an international community for open robotics education. It consists of a combination of hands-on experimentation with the
MIRTE robot and the participant’s own laptop, combined with group discussions, in which participants will explore the potential of integrating the MIRTE Pioneer into their educational environments.

In 2020, a new two-year MSc programme in robotics was launched. Unlike most existing robotics programmes, which approach robotics from a specific discipline, this programme aims to train multi-deployable robot generalists using a cognitive approach (no hardware creation). The field of robotics is multidisciplinary by nature and educating students on how to approach projects with a multidisciplinary mindset is at the forefront of the programme. Hence, at the end of the first year, students are thrust into experiencing the true multi-disciplinarity of the robotics field in a synthesizing, multidisciplinary project-based course. In this 5 EC course, students work together in groups of 5 on an industry-based assignment making a translation of societal issues from different perspectives (human, sustainability, safety, ethics, economic, etc.) into intelligent robot solutions. Each team develops and tests a complete, integrated software package for a complex robot system in a simulated environment and implements it in a real robot at the end of the course. Various robots are used, each related to a different case study which is taken on by multiple teams. Students are supported in their project with workshops and minilectures on transferable skills, systems engineering and the Robot Operating System (ROS). This paper describes the development, implementation, and results of the course over its first three years of running. It will present lessons learned from the perspectives of all parties involved: lecturers, technical staff, industry, and students as well as future plans and recommendations for others looking at creating similar courses.