Review Reports - Exploring Robot Connectivity and Collaborative Sensing in a High-School Enrichment Program

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is about the creation and implementation of the enrichment model program for high school students introducing them to the concepts of Industry 4.0.

1. The paper “looks” like project report. The introduction and overview sections are very detailed but focused only on the technology side of the problem. It would be good to review also some similar models and results of similar student education programs all over the world.

2. Authors claim to develop students Industry 4.0 skills, but in reality they focus only on some of them. Although they namely mention focus on two main areas - IoT and collaborative sensing, in fact the main focus is on robotics and robotics related disciplines. Also, the data from questionaires didn't support the topics, as there are only 3 of 5 schools contributed to the IoT and none of them on collaborative sensing? Is there missing something?

3. Authors are evaluating the increase of interest in presented subjects, but this is quite biased when assuming the schools with technical background. It is not difficult to imagine, that students visiting technical school will have higher afinity to the topics presented in the study.

4. The methodology of the research is well described, but the paper is missing the attempt to find also some objective measures. All the findings are based purely on student's evaluation of the courses. Is there a chance to measure results at least more objectively - e.g. using some knowledge tests, measuring the time required to solve some problems, or capturing which of the learned skills are really used for problem-solving.

5. Data analysis (p. 11) - did you check the distribution? Why you didn't use the paired t-test?

6. Data presentation (p. 14) - adding the corresponding rows and columns to the tables containing the calculated correlations, authors can completely remove the lines 563-579. It is much better to see results in tabular form instead of listing them line by line in the long sentences.

7. Some of the citations seems unrelated - e.g. the [29] is not related to the sensor technology importance comparable to ICT, or the [31] is not even mentioning the traffic route planning. For such cases, use the primary sources.

8. Nine experiments is too few for the reinforced learning experiment described on lines 277-280. Could you explain?

Minor changes:

Please, use the age range of your students instead of classes. For those, who are not knowing the school system in your country is information about tenth graders insufficient.

For Education 4.0. please provide an appropriate citation.

Line 123 - remove the additional 'the' (the the scaling)

Line 231 - Tultlebot -> Turtlebot

[16] - instead of simple SMART, please use the full title of the mentioned webpage (SMART Robotics Technician Curriculum) and add also a page provider (CMU).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is well written and the contents are well organized.
The sole problem that I concerned is the topic.
If the special issue focuses on Robot Education, I believe the submission is pretty good.
As a reviewer, I would like to recommend the work for a possible acceptance.

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 2 for the positive evaluation of our paper.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper describes work on the development and implementation of technical curricula and engagement activities for high-school students on Industry 4.0 related subjects. This work is a continuation of the work presented in [1]

The subject described on the paper is highly relevant in our current times and is very well described. It will serve as a base and inspiration for other to proceed in the same direction. Although these approaches are not new, and inclusively the authors rely much in some of the contents provided by other initiatives, like the MIT BWSI program, and actually collaborate with MIT for this purpose, the researched was applied with different scenarios and culture. As such, the conclusions and the knowledge gathered are relevant for others in Education 4.0 development.

The paper is very well written, and I have only some minor English suggestions, given as comments in the attached PDF file. Below you find some additional suggestions/comments.

- Sections and subsections should not start without any text, as it happens with Section 1.

- Line 49: Although the described approach is very technical and technological, most educators agree that the Arts component is also very relevant for the individual’s education. My suggestion is to consider mentioning STEAM, instead of STEM.

- Line 55: Needs to be rewritten.

- Is the numbering of Figures 6 A and B following the journal template?

- In Table 2, what is the difference between the 0 for Robot Construction in School 5, compared, for instance, with the "-" for "Drone programming". Does the "0" means that the course included robot constructions, but no student considered it to have contributed to their skills?

- Line 576 and 578: It sounds strange that U is exactly 222.5 with p<0.001 in both situations. Wasn't this a “Copy&Paste” error?

[1] Verner, I.; Cuperman, D.; Romm, T.; Reitman, M.; Chong, S. K.; Gong, Z. Intelligent Robotics in high school: An educational paradigm for the industry 4.0 era. In Auer, M.E.; Thrasyvoulos, T., Eds.; The Challenges of the Digital Transformation in Education, 2; Springer: Cham, Switzeland; 2019, pp. 824-832.