Abstract:

Educational robotics is becoming an essential tool to teach the main disciplines in STEM. Moreover, in Spain is happening a revolution in classrooms and teachers need to improve their skills to adapt themselves to the new century. In 2015, the Madrid Community established that every high school would have a 3D printer and an educational kit to learn Technology, Programming and Robotics [1].

Now, the main discussion and worry among teachers is to decide what educational kit - which involves electronics, mechanics and might be programmed, is the best to teach this subject [2]. This is a critical decision because they need the most complete and not too expensive platform because of the budget assigned.

In this paper, we present a new educational robotic kit as an option to teach the subject. We also comment all benefits this platform could offer and we justify those reasons based on a survey made among several teachers from the the Madrid Community.

Before of developing the educational kit, we made some research trying to find which were the main features a robotic kit should have asking several teachers from the Madrid Community [3]. This was made by a survey in which they scored some specific factors in a limited scale. The results of that survey provide us very important information and the way to develop the kit attending to their comments. In those results, there are two very important requirements we need to provide to teachers. The first one is that the educational robotic kit has to be compatible with 3D printing technologies including the possibility to add some parts to the robot. The second one is that the kit has to be as modular as possible. This is because technologies are evolving so fast, and their budget is very limited so with a modular robot they will be able to improve the platform in a cheaper way. In this way, students will be able to reuse and upgrade the robots year after year.

Thus, we made the ProtoCREA educational robotic kit. This robot has been made to facilitate teaching and with a wide range of possible activities to do in the classroom.

Furthermore, we have developed a novelty method to plug-in/out new components in a very easy way using 3D printers. This has a huge advantage offering the possibility to students and teachers to develop some improvements or customizations for the robot.

Finally, we present some results from testing the educational platform in the Gabriela Mistral High School from Arroyomolinos city in the south of Madrid, and also in some courses offered for teachers.

References:
[1] Spain, “Decreto 48/2015, de 14 de mayo, del Consejo de Gobierno, por el que se establece para la Comunidad de Madrid el currículo de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria,” Boletín Oficial de la Comunidad de Madrid (BOCM), no. 118, pp. 10–309, 2015.
[2] V. González, R. Pérula-Martínez, F. R. Cañadillas, M. A. Salichs and C. Balaguer, “Estado de la Tecnología en Robótica Educativa para la Educación Secundaria”, XXXVI JORNADAS DE AUTOMÁTICA, 2015.
[3] R. Pérula-Martínez, V. González, F. R. Cañadillas, M. A. Salichs and C. Balaguer, “Introducing Common Factors for Standardizing the Market of Educational Robots”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (In Press).

Keywords:

Educational robots, innovation, printbots, stem, 3D printers.