Abstract:

The Royal Academy of Engineering Connecting STEM Teachers' Programme collaborative project has been running for eight years and has involved using robotics to develop not only skills in assembling, coding and testing educational robots but also in developing skills in teamwork and collaborative working skills necessary in the 21st century technology-based economy and the workforce needed to support it.
There are four separate parts to the project:
1) Line-tracking robots. Used in activities with upper primary school pupils. Pupils use provided tracks to determine the parameters within which the robots function. They then design their own tracks to determine other limitations of the robots and report their findings to their peer group and teachers.
2) Clawbots. Used with both upper primary and lower secondary school students. These are controlled by a hand-held controller and assembled by the pupils in their schools prior to the event. They are used in activities to determine the difficulty in controlling a robot that is a few meters away and how much more challenging it is to operate a robot many millions of kilometres away e.g. on Mars.
3) Battle Bots. Robots that are controlled by movements of the operators' hand. The glove worn by the operator contains an accelerometer and a transmitter. The robot has a receiver and a processor which convert the hand movements in to commands. The activity can be combined with maths where the pupil answers a maths question (relevant to has/her age and ability) and uses the robot to score a goal in a game of table-top football.
4) Code bots. Codeable robots which can be coded by the student to complete a given task e.g. retrieving a box of supplies with a tool made by the pupil/s. This will necessitate the pupil also applying maths to code the robot to travel distances and navigate obstacles on a moonscape.
The activities involve students from both special needs and non-special needs schools. Many students (and some teachers) from mainstream schools may never have met pupils from special schools. The programme has enabled these interactions to take place with positive outcomes for pupils and teachers.

Keywords:

Robotics, special needs schools, clawbot, battle bot, codebot.