Mattie Robot - a White-box Approach for Introducing Children with Different Interests to Robotics

Abstract

Robotics is an excellent tool for teaching science and technology, so current approaches in educational robotics mostly focus on these domains. However, besides engineering we also need social sciences, design and business approaches in robotics. Crazy Robots is a top-down approach to educational robotics from the product developer’s perspective. Curiosity, creativity, persistence, and teamwork are in focus. In three consecutive workshops at five high schools, children aged 11-13 work through three incisive phases of product development: “ideation”, “prototyping”, and “evaluation”. The approach follows the educational goals of empowering children, providing a structure for creative processes, and teaching the product perspective (top-down). Feedback from teachers and students reflects the positive achievements of the concept.

Publication
6th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE2015)