Abstract
Robots have become a popular educational tool in secondary education, introducing scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical concepts to students all around the globe. In this paper EUROPA, an extensible, open software and open hardware robotic platform is presented focusing on teaching physics, sensors, data acquisition and robotics. EUROPA’s software infrastructure is based οn Robot Operating System (ROS). It includes easy to use interfaces for robot control and interaction with users and thus can easily be incorporated in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and robotics classes. EUROPA was designed taking into account current trends in educational robotics. An overview of widespread robotic platforms is presented, documenting several critical parameters of interest such as their architecture, sensors, actuators and controllers, their approximate cost, etc. Finally, an introductory STEM curriculum developed for EUROPA and applied in a class of high school students is presented.
Highlights
Robotics represents an innovative field that encompasses various scientific domains, from physics and electronics to mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer programming
The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, we present a comprehensive review of the state of the art on educational robotic platforms through K12 to college and university and second, we present
Our research reveals that there is a gap in the low-cost range of Robot Operating System (ROS)-based educational robotics
Summary
Robotics represents an innovative field that encompasses various scientific domains, from physics and electronics to mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer programming. Rooted in Papert’s seminal ideas on computational thinking using LOGO programming and Mindstorms [1], educational robotics is increasingly becoming popular in the classroom. It is supportive in teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) [2,3] and in some cases it transcends the traditional science border and becomes supportive of artistic activities (STEAM) [4,5]. Interacting with robots can even be beneficial for children in a kindergarten [7,8] and it can play an important therapeutic role in special education [9]
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