Thymio in the classroom. Source: YouTube

Despite phenomenal advances in the field of robotics in recent years and specifically the field of robots for use in the classroom, there is still a large shortfall in the number of teachers who actively involve robots in their lessons. In order to try to understand this gap in the usage of teaching robots, a group from NCCR Robotics and LSRO, EPFL completed a study focusing on teachers who had completed training sessions for the Thymio educational robot.

Where most previous studies on robots used in schools have concentrated on acceptance by students, this study focused on their teachers, with the idea that teachers are those who decide what to include in their lessons, and thus are those who need to be convinced of the value of robots in classrooms. The study found that not only did teachers tend to be more sure of the abilities of their students to use the robots than of their own, meaning that they did not always feel comfortable to include robots in their lessons, but also that they were more likely to incorporate robots into teaching plans if they felt that they would also learn something about robotics themselves. This “soif de connaissance” and desire to transmit it highlights the need for specific teacher training sessions, allowing teachers to feel more comfortable in their own abilities and to increase their knowledge of a certain field area.

The research also showed that more teachers were put off from using educational robots by the perception that set-up of exercises will take a significant amount of time. It therefore has been shown that in order for robots to progress fully into the classroom, resources and turn-key practice exercises need to be made not only freely available, but also be well publicised.

Recent exercises have shown that a concerted effort to create fun, educational activities can result in Thymio being used for a wide variety of teaching goals. One example took place in April 2016, where a group of NCCR Robotics and LSRO, EPFL researchers went to the Cambridge, UK science festival and worked with researchers at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge to explain the concept of stem cells using Thymio at a public education event. Thymio has also recently been included in a new set of exercises distributed to 10’000 French schools and is to be adopted for the 2016-2017 school year. Robots need not only be used to explain robotics and computer science, but can be used for a wide variety of subjects such as geography, biology and art.

It is generally understood that robotics is a significant part of the future of society, and this latest paper addresses not just the acceptance of robots by the children who we aim to teach, but the acceptance of those who will be teaching them. With this in hand, NCCR Robotics can tailor aspects of its research in the Transversal Educational Activity (TEA) to create an affordable teaching robot and accessible exercises to facilitate the entry of robots into the classroom.

Thymio has a number of exercises designed for teachers to use during classes on their website, along with a tutorial written by Prof. Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari, an expert in educational science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, to show teachers how the exercises work.

Reference:

M. Chevalier, F. Riedo and F. Mondada, “How do teachers perceive educational robots in formal education? A study based on the Thymio robot*”, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 23, no. 2, pp.16-23, 2016.

Thymio is a playful robot designed to help children discover programming, motors, light and motion sensors, and ultimately, logical and inventive thinking – right out of the box. Earlier versions of Thymio are already in use at home or school by tens of thousands of children worldwide. Now Thymio’s development team is crowdfunding to bring you a wireless version of this loveable educational robot. If you’ve always wanted a Thymio, this is a great opportunity to get one; and if you already own a Thymio and bought it after May 2012, this is your chance to upgrade to a wireless version. No more USB cables! This is the same Thymio you know and love, only better.

Why go wireless? Thymio is known for working right out of the box, and for its easy to use visual programming interface. The new wireless version makes programming the Thymio with behaviours even simpler because you can update its behaviours on the fly.

Development for the wireless module is almost finished, and the crowdfunding campaign will support production of the new wireless Thymio. The campaign is run by Mobsya, a non-profit association whose mission is to promote technology education through fun and accessible robotics.

Want to learn more about the Thymio?

• Kidbotics review: Thymio II
• Robots Podcast interview with Thymio team members Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat
• Taking your first steps in robotics with the Thymio II

If that’s the case, or if you’re simply interested in learning more about the Thymio, head over to Thymio & Aseba. There you can find an excellent guide on using the visual programming language (VPL) bundled with Aseba, to program the Thymio II. This guide includes an introduction to the Thymio II and the VPL, and contains a number of small projects of increasing complexity, designed to gradually introduce new features, sensors, actuators and ideas to the reader.

On the Thymio & Aseba site, you will also find numerous project examples (for example ball balancing, as pictured above), many of which include Aseba source code examples and an implementation discussion. You can also find various constructions, which take advantage of the Thymio’s LEGO Technic interoperability to build many weird and wonderful creations including cranes, funicular railways, walking robots and more.

Of these many project examples, three projects really stood out to me:

1. The simple pendulum, where the Thymio’s accelerometer is used to investigate the dynamics of a swinging pendulum;
2. The scales (shown below), where mechanical scales are built and the Thymio’s distance sensor used to digitize the weight measurement; and
3. The reflectivity measure, which uses the Thymio’s IR sensor to measure optical reflectivity of various objects at known distances, automated using the Thymio’s wheels to drive an arm mechanism.

These three examples demonstrate that robots, although cool in their own right, are also an excellent tool for learning more about the world around us.

With a background in mechanical engineering and an interest in design, engineering and working with kids, I happened into robotics education – and now I’ve been happily teaching and involved for five years.

I started out teaching Lego Mindstorms at a creative, after-school robotics program called Wizbots. After three years of teaching Lego Mindstorms to over 1000 kids, I had a good idea of its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages? Durable and great for the imagination. The disadvantages? If you weren’t an expert LEGO builder it’s a bit intimidating, it’s expensive, and you are stuck in a graphical programming world with no easy transition to learn real programming.

After three years of teaching, I started working with the robotics company Willow Garage to design an exhibit for The Tech Museum with the $400,000 PR2 robot. I helped design the software and interactive experience that had guests from 2 years to 99 years programming the robot. Guests created and saved poses by moving sliders, and then saw their code being composed in real time. We saw everything from the PR2 dancing the Macarena to performing Shakespeare.

I loved the fact that the PR2 inspired kids to get into robotics and lessened the intimidation of programming – it’s too bad that PR2’s size and price tag makes it impossible for a user to continue the learning experience at home. Fortunately, it was also at Willow Garage that I first came across the Thymio II robot and one of the involved researchers from EPFL. I immediately took a liking to this cute and personable little robot, with its 20 sensors and 39 LED. With such personality, I automatically assigned a gender, so from now on if I refer to a ‘he’, please understand that I am referring to the Thymio II, and know that I’ve also had kids decide that the Thymio is really a ‘she’.

I had a hunch that this would be a hit among kids and an excellent teaching tool for robotics. The first time I brought Thymio to the classroom, I gave a presentation about robotics, and boy did the kids FLIP when I took out Thymio. All of the kids excitedly exclaimed, “YOU HAVE A ROBOT, IN YOUR BAG?!”

The first time I took Thymio into a classroom was for my interview with Woodland School. After seeing such excitement from both the kindergarteners and 5th graders, I was pulled into work for Woodland as their Instructional Technology Coordinator for K-8th grade and to create a curriculum around Thymio.

What I love about the Thymio is its adaptability – I’ve been able to teach with it at every age level, from K-8 in the classroom. Thymio has all components in one, and many pre-programmed modes. For kindergarten we can talk about motors and sensors, and behaviors. The kids will create interactive animals by building off of Thymio with LEGO and other arts and crafts and then use the pre-programmed behaviors.

For the students who are around 8-10 years Thymio has been a great tool to teach experimentation, technology, critical thinking, programming, invention, teamwork, design, building … and I could go on and on. The visual programming language composes code in real time and creates a nice bridge to written code. I ran a successful summer camp where I was able to easily teach programming iterations and code writing to kids as young as seven.

Seeing such success in the classroom has motivated me to create a curriculum for other teachers so that they may be able to receive a box of robots and, with the help of an online curriculum, to then be able to start teaching a class. That is the reason why I started TechyKids. The best part about all of this is that the Thymio is a robot that, after some initial guidance, will motivate kids to learn and experiment themselves. Today was (another) perfect example of this – I helped with some troubleshooting for a 4th grade class, who were getting started with Thymio, but after that the kids were fully engrossed in their own work.

Some of the casual side conversations were as follows:

Student #1: “Oh, I think I know!”
Student #2: “Why?”

Student #3: “Now, I wonder how I can get him to sense a cliff…”

Female Student #1: “I love Technology.”

Student #4: “I found a way to make him blush.”
Student #5: “How did you do that?”

Female Student #2: “Would you rather have more PE or Technology?”
Female Student #3: “Technology, definitely”

What I loved about the Thymio-inspired conversations is that they came out naturally. Kids were asking why, collaborating, helping each other, and were passionate about their work. Classrooms everywhere have been yearning for this kind of a result, and I feel fortunate to have come upon a product that can produce such fulfilling results. The way I see it, if we can get kids programming robots at the age of seven, by the time they are in high school and beyond, they’ll be doing something even more amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIyN7AKF-4

Thymio II was introduced at the 2011 EPFL Robotic Festival. Now, with the introduction of Aseba, the creative toolset associated with it is complete. Aseba allows even younger children to animate their creations by programming Thymio II. Developed within the framework of the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research Robotics, by a team of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Ecole d’Art de Lausanne (écal), the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) and the Mobsya association, Thymio II has been distributed to more than 1000 Swiss children. Examples of what they’ve done with it can be found on the Aseba website. Thymio II is available for 99 Swiss Francs, plus 32 Francs for shipping and administrative costs (totaling just over US $140), from the mobsya association.

Link to audio file (35:00)

Link to transcript

In today’s episode we speak with Francesco Mondada, organizer of the Robotics Festival at EPFL that gathers over 15’000 visitors for hands-on workshops and demonstrations. We also walk you through the many exhibits showcasing multi-robot systems, flying robots, rehabilitation robots and robotic salamanders.

Francesco Mondada
Francesco Mondada is the director of the Miniature Mobile Robots Group at EPFL in Switzerland. We spoke with him last fall about his work in Educational Robotics. An expert in education, he received the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching last year. Some of his most popular robots used in schools and labs around the world include the Khepera, the S-bot and marXbot, the e-puck and more recently the Thymio and Thymio II. He also founded and was CEO of K-Team, a Swiss based company that develops, manufactures and markets mobile robots for use in advanced education and research. In this interview we catch his first impressions after the 5th edition of the Robotics Festival that took place at EPFL. A success from the very beginning, the Robotics Festival managed this year to draw 15’000 visitors in a single day of interactive workshops, demos, and robotic shows and featured demonstrations of Festo’s AirJelly.

Robotics Festival
The Robotics Festival aims to demystify engineering for the general public and especially kids. Of the 15’000 visitors, 1994 attended workshops where they learned to make robots, program and do electronics, while 6091 attended robotics shows. The rest walked around the many exhibits showcasing latest advances in robotics by research institutions and industry. In this episode, we take you to some of the demos:

• Sven Gowal: Distributed robotics
• Adrian Arfire: Olfactory robots
• Adrien Briod: Airburr
• Maja Varga: Swarmix
• Alessandro Crespi : Salamander Robots
• Roger Gassert : Rehabilitation robots

Here are some of the robots mentioned.

Links:

• Download mp3 (22.7MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Robotics Festival Website(french)
• Francesco Mondada’s Homepage

Link to audio file (35:16)

In today’s show, we look at the playful field of educational robotics. We start by talking to Dr. Francesco Mondada, the leader of the MOBOTS group at EPFL, about his group’s efforts in this field. Focus is given to the Robotics Festival, an annual event he started back in 2008. We then talk with Stéphane Magnenat, a former member of the group and current member of the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETHZ. Stéphane developed ASEBA, a straight-forward software package that allows beginners to program robots easily and efficiently. Finally, Fanny Riedo, PhD student in the MOBOTS group, presents the low-cost educational Thymio II robot.

EPFL Robotics Festival

Francesco Mondada

Founder and former CEO of K-Team, currently the head of the Miniature Mobile Robots Group (MOBOTS) at EPFL, Francesco Mondada has been one of the main people behind such popular research and educational robots as the Khepera, the S-bot, the e-puck and more recently the Thymio and Thymio II.

In this episode, he tells us about the work that MOBOTS is doing in educational robotics and then presents the popular Robotics Festival, held every year at EPFL. A success from the very beginning, the Robotics Festival managed this year to draw 13’000 visitors in a single day of interactive workshops, demos, and robotic shows.

Stéphane Magnenat

Currently working as senior scientist in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETHZ, Stéphane did his PhD within the MOBOTS group, where he developed ASEBA.

ASEBA is an event-based architecture for distributed control of mobile robots. It includes a user-friendly scripting language and a tightly integrated development environment which allows novices to rapidly start programming robot behaviors.

ASEBA has been used with success in the Robotics Festival for teaching children basic robot programming.

Fanny Riedo

Fanny Riedo is doing her PhD on educational robotics with the MOBOTS group and presents the project she is currently focusing on: the Thymio II robot.

The Thymio II is an affordable children-oriented educational robot. It has a large amount of sensors and actuators, a specific interactivity based on light and touch, which is aimed at increasing the understanding of the robot functionalities, and can be programmed easily by using ASEBA.

Links:

• Download mp3 (20.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Francesco Mondada’s Homepage
• Stéphane Magnenat’s Homepage
• Fanny Riedo’s Homepage