«Teaching environment with Arduino and Python for Robotic Education in Secondary»
José María CañasURJC
Abstract
The ability to program robotic systems is increasingly demanded and robotics, as well as useful in itself, is perceived as a powerful tool for introducing children to technological concepts in an attractive way. The Community of Madrid incorporated the last academic year the subject “Technology, Programming and Robotics” in the official curriculum of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). According to our experience with robotic educational platforms such as Scratch, Lego Mindstorms, Lego WeDo, etc., the demand of the students of the last stage of compulsory education surpasses more and more the capacity of development of such platforms although they are good for inferior academic levels. We present a novel educational platform based on Arduino microprocessor and Python language that allows to enter in the world of Informatics, Electronics and Robotics in a gentle way and for its power scale in complexity to interesting applications for the students of those courses.
Biografía
José María Cañas worked for five years at the Industrial Automation Institute (CSIC), in data mining and the generation of autonomous behavior in mobile robots. His lines of research are robotics and computer vision. In these topics he directs projects of the National Plan of R & D, of the Community of Madrid and of transference to companies. He has been part of the only Spanish team in RoboCup’s standard humanoid league. He regularly publishes in area magazines. He has conducted four research stays at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with Reid Simmons, and at the Georgia Tech Institute with Ronald Arkin. He is a professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, where he coordinates the robotics group.
