Abstract
Robotics provides useful tools for educational purposes, allowing to engage students in learning within disparate domains, from computer science and artificial intelligence – traditionally the main domains for educational robotics – to general education, human and social sciences and arts. Robots can be used with different purposes, from being simple tools to be programmed with some specific behaviour, to being peers with whom to engage in a fruitful interaction for a collaborative learning purpose. In this sense, they can also foster learning of transversal skills such as communication and cooperation. In this article, we propose robot swarms as a novel educational tool to target exactly those transversal skills that are difficult to account otherwise. The usage of multiple robots interacting to solve a common problem can support the learning of concepts related to cooperation and collective actions and can make accessible notions about complex systems that are common in physical, biological, economic and social sciences. Additionally, the possibility to interact and participate in the collective behaviour displayed by the robot swarm can strongly increase the comprehension and engagement with the proposed concept. Motivated by this picture, we propose a roadmap for the utilization of swarm robotics for educational purposes, which is hinged on the Thymio robot, a simple but powerful educational robot that presents all the features required for swarm robotics experimentation. We propose two case studies and we substantiate the proposal with preliminary results from a demonstration of robot swarms performed during a recent robotics festival.
Highlights
Nowadays, robotics has deeply entered our society beyond the industrial and applicative sectors, to the point that robots are proposed as companions for our daily activities,[1,2,3,4] especially for therapeutic and assisted living purposes.[5,6] Educational uses of robots are widespread.[7]
We describe the selected scenario and the rationale behind its choice, and we propose an implementation for the Thymio using the Blockly visual programming interface,[9,47] chosen here because it is commonly used in educational contexts and well represents the event-driven programming approach used by the Thymio robot
We propose that a Thymio–Beacon plays the role of the collaboration site, so that it can actively monitor for the presence of a sufficient number of Thymio–Workers around it for an effective collaboration to take place
Summary
Robotics has deeply entered our society beyond the industrial and applicative sectors, to the point that robots are proposed as companions for our daily activities,[1,2,3,4] especially for therapeutic and assisted living purposes.[5,6] Educational uses of robots are widespread.[7]. Children can find strategies to interact with robots by changing their attitude based on their own perception of the problem (e.g. by making them more collaborative if they are leaning towards a seemingly wrong option or the other way round) In this way, they can try to maximize the probability of success by taking an active part in the collective decision process. By varying the initial setup, it is possible to showcase a variety of situations to demonstrate how the different attitudes of the robots impact on the efficiency of the group In this way, children can learn that collaborations are not made without some predisposition to wait for others and some flexibility in the own behaviour. To understand how children reacted to the demo and the game, we administered a questionnaire containing the following questions: 1. Did you like the demo and the game?
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