Teaching a Core CS Concept through Robotics

We implemented single-session workshops using the Thymio- II—a small, self-contained robot designed for young stu- dents, and VPL—a graphical software development envi- ronment based upon event handling. Our goal was to in- vestigate if the students could learn this core computer sci- ence concept while enjoying themselves in the robotics con- text. A visual questionnaire was developed based upon the combined Bloom and SOLO taxonomies, although it proved difficult to construct a questionnaire appropriate for young students. We found that—despite the short duration of the workshop—all but the youngest students achieved the cog- nitive level of Unistructural Understanding, while some stu- dents achieved higher levels of Unistructural Applying and Multistructural Understanding and Applying

Enhancing Robot Programming with Visual Feedback and Augmented Reality

In our previous research, we showed that students using the educational robot Thymio and its visual programming envi-ronment were able to learn the important computer-science concept of event-handling. This paper extends that work by integrating augmented reality (ar) into the activities. Students used a tablet that displays in real time the event executed on the robot. The event is overlaid on the tablet over the image from a camera, which shows the location of the robot when the event was executed. In addition, visual feedback (fb) was implemented in the software. We devel-oped a novel video questionnaire to investigate the perfor-mance of the students on robotics tasks. Data were collected comparing four groups: ar+fb, ar+non-fb, non-ar+fb, non-ar+non-fb. The results showed that students receiving feedback made significantly fewer errors on the tasks. Those using ar made fewer errors, but this improvement was not significant, although their performance improved. Technical problems with the ar hardware and software showed where improvements are needed