

Harvard researchers build $10 robot to teach kids to code - hansy
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/10-dollar-education-robot/

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blhack
This really is absolutely fantastic.

I spend a pretty good amount of time teaching kids how to code, and one of THE
BIGGEST things is giving them something that seems like more than just an
exercise. Robots are totally perfect for this.

I help with a program in Phoenix called Mach1 labs (a hackerspace inside of a
library), and there we have a bunch of these:
[http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Backorder-Shield-
Bot-p-1380...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Backorder-Shield-
Bot-p-1380.html)

So far, this has been far and away the best thing I have found for getting
kids interested in programming.

I usually start them with this sketch:
[https://github.com/blhack/shieldbot/blob/master/shieldbot_st...](https://github.com/blhack/shieldbot/blob/master/shieldbot_stub.ino)

With super simple commands like "go forwards" and "go backwards", they can get
the bot to do what they want really quickly. It is definitely the "ah ha!"
moment of programming.

I've taught kids as young as 5 enough that they could make that thing drive to
their brother, turn around, and come back to them.

Hands down some of my favorite moments working with kids have been watching
them debug their way through writing a sketch to make the robot solve a maze.

The big problem with this bot, though, is that it's $70 + and arduino
($20ish). For a lot of parents, a $90 investment into something is a bit
scary, especially for lower income kids, which really hurts :( (If I could I'd
give every single kid I met a shieldbot and an arduino, and it sucks knowing
that only the rich kids are getting them).

This thing being $10, not apparently requiring an additional board, or cables,
or anything is just...freaking awesome. If this thing becomes widely
available, it would call it a game changer for at least the things that I'm
doing. If I can buy 9 of these for what was previously the cost of 1
sheildbot, that is a HUGE win (especially for lower income kids).

Totally totally awesome!

>Rubenstein says that for the bot’s next iteration, the group is focusing on
improving the curriculum and the software, eliminating steps in the
installation process and ensuring AERobot is so simple that kids can learn how
to use the thing on their own—without a teacher.

AH! No, screw that! Figure out how to mass-manufacture these things. Let the
huge community of software hackers who are looking for stuff like this figure
out how to develop pretty IDEs around it!

~~~
Lerc
>Figure out how to mass-manufacture these things.

So what is involved with making a large number of these things? They have the
design available. Is it just a matter of giving a board manufacturing company
the design and a truckload of money and they will send you 1,000-1,000,000
boards(depending on size of truck)?

~~~
anigbrowl
Toy companies specialize in making cheap plastic things with a little bit of
electronics functionality, and making the money back on volume.

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hausen
The project page has more details, including the schematic, PCB layout and
BOM:
[https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home](https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home)

The circuit is pretty simple, to keep the parts count low and, consequently,
the price. An Atmega168 is the brain of this project.

~~~
akavel
What was specially interesting for me is how they achieved the low cost --
especially their use of _vibration motors!_ :

 _" There are four main designs features that help keep the AERobot low-cost.

1) The robot electronics are designed to use only SMD components which can all
be placed using a pick-and-place machine, drastically reducing assembly costs.
Additionally, all components are mounted on a single side of the PCB, cutting
assembly cost in half when compared to a PCB with components on both sides.
All remaining assembly steps are very simple and can be done by the student in
a few minutes. The PCB also doubles as the main robot chassis, further
reducing robot cost and complexity.

2) The use of vibration motors greatly reduces the overall robot cost as
vibration motors are cheaper than standard motors, and don’t use the extra
hardware found in most robots such as gearboxes and wheels.

3) Using a USB interface built directly into the PCB removes the additional
costs, incurred by most robots, of an external programmer and charger, which
can easily double the cost of a complete robot system for robots at this price
range.

4) AERobot uses purely optical sensors (the infrared transmitters and
photodiodes) which have no moving parts, are generally lower cost than most
other sensors, and are robust to dusty environments."_

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Vexs
Sadly, I don't think this (and similar things) will take off. Not because its
bad, but because of public school bureaucracy. In my experience, teachers
either have to pay out of pocket, or use "approved vendors" which, most
likely, won't stock things like this. Heck, one teacher bought a bunch of
arduinos but someone somewhere had a fit over sit-up and now there's a box of
unused arduinos sitting in the corner.

Not just that either, in many public schools enginnering/Cs classes are "Blow
off" classes, not due to the teachers, but the students in them.

This probably isn't true everwhere, but that seems to be pretty common.

~~~
blhack
You're looking at school wrong. There is a HUGE push right now in the library
system to get these things, and they're getting funding for it.

~~~
cbhl
It's funny. I know my high school robotics program took library technology
funds to buy robots and parts one year. While the teachers thought the ROI was
good, I'm still surprised that nobody villain-ified it as "robotics programs
are stealing from textbook money".

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craigching
This looks awesome and the visual programming kit makes it even cooler for
kids. I have a six year old daughter and a three year old son and we've been
doing WeDo LEGOs for just over a year now and I'm looking for the "next step."
This seems like a good possibility.

Another option I'm considering is arduino so we can disconnect the LEGO usb
hub from the computer and get a more autonomous experience. The hard part
about that is that I don't know of any visual languages I could use with
Arduino. If anyone has some ideas that might support this, I'd appreciate
sharing.

I'm going to look into the project page link that hausen shared, really glad
to see this!

EDIT: Does anyone know how practical it would be for someone like me to do
this? I have 0 electronics experience, but they provide the plans for the
board, is it easy to get the board built? Sorry for total newb question here,
but I'm genuinely interested in doing something like this.

~~~
mlangdon
I just got a pololu zumo robot for prototyping an industrial application at
work. My daughter is only 3, but if she were 5-12 it would be a likely gift
for her this Christmas. Just snap an arduino uno on top and you are literally
off to the races. Not sure about the visual options there, but the example
programs are an excellent hacking off point.

~~~
craigching
Ok, that's pretty neat, going on _my_ Christmas list ;) Thanks for sharing!

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markkanof
This is fantastic. My wife and I run an after school technology club at the
school where she teaches. The school/principle are very supportive of what we
are doing, but we have limited funding so try to stretch every dollar as far
as possible.

I've found that the students respond most enthusiastically to any kind of
programming that involves making something happen outside of the computer they
are working at. That could be anything from writing code to send text messages
to building robots and writing code to control them.

Thus far I've kicked in some of my own money to buy some Arduinos/Beagle Bones
and various motors, servos, etc. Those things don't end up costing that much,
but there is quite a lot of work to be done before the students can see any
results, so only the more advanced students maintain interest. I think having
an inexpensive platform like this that is ready to program for is a huge win.

The one thing I'm not thrilled about is it seems like this robot is programmed
via a drag and drop graphical environment. I find that the students are
perfectly capable of understanding simple code instructions and obscuring the
programming with graphical elements just complicates their understanding of
what's really happening. From another article about this robot it seems to
indicate that code is being generated in the background, so hopefully that is
easily editable, or the graphical environment can be ignored completely.

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ash
Great project! It's interesting they use vibration motors for motion. And
vibration motors are not touching the floor directly. How do they transfer the
movement to the floor? Also, is it possible to go backwards?

~~~
ash
Answering my own question. The robot is based on Kilobot that uses similar
locomotion:

"The Kilobots move by controlling two vibrating motors, the same type as you
have in your mobile phone and the movement is based on similar micro
vibrations. The same principle is used when you leave your phone on a table
and the vibrator goes off. The Kilobots actually jump forward, but the jumps
are vertically so small that you don't see them leave the table surface. They
actually fly for a little while. The robots accurately controlled motion to
ensure that the locomotion stays energy efficient, conserving the battery for
an extended operating time." [http://m.electronicdesign.com/boards/kilobot-
swarms](http://m.electronicdesign.com/boards/kilobot-swarms)

And:

"Kilobot uses two sealed coin shaped vibration motors for locomotion. When one
of these motors is activated, the centripetal forces generated by the
vibrating motor are converted to a forward force on the Kilobot located at the
motor’s mounting location. The principle of converting the motor vibration to
a forward force can be explained using the slip-stick principle… The slip-
stick locomotion of a Kilobot was confirmed using high-speed video of the
robot’s movement. Due to the off-center mounting of the two vibration motors,
as shown in Fig. 1, the vibration of one motor alone will cause a rotation of
the Kilobot about its vertical axis, while the vibration of the other motor
will cause an opposite rotation. By controlling the magnitude of vibration for
the two motors independently in a differential drive manner, the robot can
move in a continuous range from clockwise rotation, to straight forward, to
counterclockwise rotation. This enables the Kilobot to move approximately 1
cm/sec and rotate approximately 45 degrees/sec."
[http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9367001/Rubenstei...](http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9367001/Rubenstein_KilobotLow.pdf?sequence=1)

There's also "Analysis and Experiments on the Force Capabilities of
Centripetal-Force-Actuated Microrobotic Platforms" article:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20121021190224/http://nereus.mec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20121021190224/http://nereus.mech.ntua.gr/pdf_ps/tro07.pdf)

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jstanek
Congrats to the researchers. Looks like it has some potential.

I think using visual programming languages for teaching concepts is a good
idea. They're great for establishing the logical constructs of computer
science, but they are lacking in talking about data structures and state
storage in general. I think a more advanced visual teaching language should
place a lot more emphasis on teaching how data structures work, which is
arguably more important to learn about computer science in the long run. But
perhaps that's a bit advanced for such a simple application.

Again, nice work!

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juliendorra
Sadly, the promise of low-cost seems hard to fulfill using traditional
distribution circuits (one single distributor and one single reseller by
country), at least for the team's previous robot, the kilobot:
[http://www.generationrobots.com/fr/201-kilobot](http://www.generationrobots.com/fr/201-kilobot)
That's more than $150 per single kilobot. The kilobot is supposedly costlier,
but we can still infer that this cheaper model will not reach $10 in stores if
the distribution model is the same. An Arduino-like ecosystem with many clones
might be better suited to very low cost robots.

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Immortalin
I usually get my electronic parts from china because of the low cost. A
arduino uno clone for example, costs less than 5 bucks when bought online, and
it works perfectly well. Add in breadboard resistors and all the other bits
and pieces and the total won't even exceed 20 bucks. The only problem is
getting them <i>into<i/> us/europe as the transportation costs are insane
compared to china's. As much as I appreciate the job done by the Mit team, the
reality is that there are plenty of low cost electronics readily available,
the problem lies in getting your hands on it.

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teddyh
This is the latest in a long line of such things, including the LOGO turtle,
Big Trak¹ and Lego Mindstorms, to name but a few examples. It always seems to
be a great idea, and certainly some people enjoy them in the intended fashion,
but they never seem to take off in the way the creators envision. Maybe it is
a question of cost, in which case this is the way forward – ever smaller,
cheaper things.

①
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak)

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brc
My sons school already has a robotics program using Lego mind storms. The kids
love it. He's 6, and was allowed into the program early due to being adept at
lego and strong in maths.

It's a public school. In the big scheme of things, a couple of mindstorms kits
are not that expensive, the trick is finding teachers who are willing to go
the extra mile and run these types of program's.

Still, I think this is a great idea.

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pm90
Where can I buy one?

~~~
agsamek
I support this question and would also like to know or read some ideas of how
it can be delivered.

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ausjke
I have a hardware team located in Shenzhen,China that can produce this in
volume, not sure if this is license-able, if it's free to manufacture I can do
it quick.

one thing is that if this requires FCC certificate etc, which may also take a
while.

~~~
ausjke
Ok it's under "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license.

NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

That says no third-party can make it unless it can do it without making any
profit, so this should be made by some non-profit organization I assume.

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ChuckMcM
Heh, except MIT actually won the challenge :-) ([http://robotics-
africa.org/2014-design-challenge.html](http://robotics-africa.org/2014-design-
challenge.html))

~~~
ash
No, the article is correct. They did win in Software category. MIT team won in
Hardware.

~~~
ChuckMcM
And MIT won in Curriculum. So out of the three MIT two firsts and a second,
Harvard two seconds and a first. They didn't score an overall winner, I just
extended the scoring to include that.

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dmritard96
Is it open source (including the hardware)? Would love to see the sensors they
are using and how they can get that price point. As someone looking out for my
bom all the time, I am pretty curious.

~~~
azdle
There's a BOM and board files linked near the bottom of the page:
[https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home/...](https://sites.google.com/site/affordableeducationrobot/home/hardware)

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copperx
I wonder whether one could program them in assembly for teaching a Machine
Code / Assembly Language class.

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mtourne
This would actually make a fantastic small christmas gift, heh I'll take one
too!

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bitfury
looks much like lego brainstorms minus the price tag.

