Robotics
To educate more engineers pupils may need some encouragement. Robotics seem a sensible choice.
Virtual robotics
A combination of LEGO Digital Designer and Lego Mindstorms [1] could allow to design and program virtual robots.
An interesting goal for expert users (e.g. to pass an exam) could be to create a factory that built other robots.
Robotics Mentoring
A small number of actual hardware robots (e.g. one) could create motivation (through "artificial" scarcity) for pupils to want to be allowed to work with the hardware robots. Robot games like Robot Odyssey [2] could be used as qualification and for mentoring purposes: Pupils are motivated to solve the game as qualification, as entertainment and because a mentor offers support and encouragement in solving the puzzles in the game. A mentor would probably need guidance in how to help a pupil to solve puzzles him - or herself, not through solutions given by the mentor. A Journal entry stating that the game had been solved could be required to run the software that allowed to program actual robots.
Butiá Project
Butiá aims to create an educational platform to teach robotics and computer science with the XO computer. You can program your robot with existing XO activitys like Tortugarte, PyPy, Chat and in the near future Scratch and others. The kit consist in a acrylic platform with motors and wheels and sensors that can be conected into the butiá conectors. It's designed to promote a constructive use, permiting to connect sensors in diferent places using perfored pieces in the kit. For more information please visit Butiá Project
tortugarte example program
References
- ^ Lego Mindstorms, LEGO Digital Designer
- ^ Robot Odyssey - A 1984 TRS-80 Color Computer robot programming game from The Learning Company (Java Version DroidQuest is free for personal or educational uses)
External links
Hardware
- Fischertechnik Robotics (The "ROBO Pro" language is being ported to Linux)
- ASURO - 40 € robot from DLR School Lab (German Wikipedia), English: arexx.com
- http://www.roberta-home.eu/ - project of the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS
- c't Bot - 200 € robot from c't magazine with onboard JavaVM, simulator and WLAN extension.