Amy Eguchi

Educational robotics for promoting 21st century skills

This paper introduces an educational robotics course offered as one of the Interdisciplinary Studies Courses under General Education category at a liberal art college that serves predominately underprivileged population of students from neighboring communities in New Jersey. It also presents the case study to examine participated students’ learning from the course. The results show that, although the focus of the course is the educational robotics and programming to control robots created with LEGO Mindstorms, the students identified their learning of collaboration and cooperation skills as well as communication skills as one of the best learning outcomes

RoboCupJunior: a decade later

As RoboCupJunior reached a decade mark in 2011, we feel the need for examining the current situation after 12 revisions and modifications to the league rules and structures since its launch in 2000. RoboCupJunior International is now attracting over 250 teams involving approximately 1,000 students originating from more than 30 countries. This paper aims to report on the progress achieved thus far, both technologically and educationally, and the issues currently addressed, together with suggestions for the future of RoboCupJunior.

The Open Academic Robot Kit

The Open Academic Robot Kit (OARKit) lowers the barrier of entry into robotics research. A community-driven initiative, it was developed in the context of the RoboCupRescue Robot League competition to advance the state of research in response robotics. All mechanical parts are 3D printable, available off the shelf and/or, ideally, drawn from a set of common parts. All designs, instructions and source code are available online in easily editable form under an open-source licence. These principles allow the OARKit robots to become powerful tools to encourage collaboration across regions, generations and areas of expertise. The principles that govern this initiative can be applied broadly to other robotics applications that require interdisciplinary skills in order to build complete, useful, interesting research implementations.

Bringing Robotics in Classrooms

Learning with educational robotics provides students, who usually are the consumers of technology, with opportunities to stop, question, and think deeply about technology. When designing, constructing, programming, and documenting the development of autonomous robots or robotics projects, students not only learn how technology works, but they also apply the skills and content knowledge learned in school in a meaningful and exciting way. Educational robotics is rich with opportunities to integrate not only STEM but also many other disciplines, including literacy, social studies, dance, music, and art, while giving students the opportunity to find ways to work together to foster collaboration skills, express themselves using the technological tool, problem-solve, and think critically and innovatively. Educational robotics is a learning tool that enhances students’ learning experience through hands-on mind-on learning. Most importantly, educational robotics provides a fun and exciting learning environment because of its hands-on nature and the integration of technology. The engaging learning environment motivates students to learn whatever skills and knowledge needed for them to accomplish their goals in order to complete the projects of their interest. For school-age children, most robotics activities have mainly been part of informal education, such as after school programs and summer camps (Benitti in Computers & Education, 58:978–988, 2012; Eguchi 2007b; Sklar and Eguchi in Proceedings of RoboCup-2004: Robot Soccer World Cup VIII, 2004), even though it has the potential to make learning more effective in formal education. It is very difficult for teachers to include robotics in regular curriculum because of the heavy focus on standardized testing and pressure to cover academic standards set by the government and/or their States. This chapter aims to promote robotics in classroom by connecting robotics learning with various STEM curriculum standards.

A proposal for RoboCupJunior in Africa: Promoting educational experience with robotics

This paper addresses RoboCupJunior, an educational robotics initiative that aims to enhance learning through educational robotics activities around the world. RoboCupJunior is a division of RoboCup, a Robotics initiative that aims to promote Robotics and AI research, by offering publicly appealing, but formidable challenges. RoboCupJunior has three distinguished leagues - Soccer, Rescue and Dance, that attract students from all the continents. However, Africa has not taken significant advantage of this initiative, with a rather low participation of a few African countries, only. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce and promote educational robotics to students in Africa in a more generalized way, with possible suggestions to make the initiative successful in the region, in the future.