Developing programmable robot for K12 STEAM education

Abstract

STEAM is the acronym that is a group of academic disciplines, Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics. In recent years, the STEAM has been considered as the core parts of K12 education system in many countries. Regarding this need, this paper attempts to develop a cheap, interactive and programmable robot to assist K12 students to learn STEAM effectively and friendly. The robot was developed based the open source – Ottobot. Its primary external structure was made by 3D printers, so its shape can be customized by users. In addition, its electrical and electronic devices are compatible to Arduino. The development kits of Arduino are friendly and free, so it is very suitable to new users like K12 and the students with non-engineering background. The control board applied in this study is a low-cost Arduino Nano, which includes 14 digital I/O and 8 analog I/O. Associated with ESP8266 or HC-06, the robot can be controlled remotely via Wifi or Bluetooth. In this paper, we demonstrated the graphical programming tool, called mBlock, to code the firmware of the robot. Its friendly programming interface is similar to the Scratch, which provides K12 students a friendly and useful tool to explore programming world. This paper does not only present the detail information of building a programmable robot, but also demonstrate a friendly tool to assist K12 students to learn the programming ability for developing a smart robot or AI related products.