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About the STEM Robotics Program

This site was created to provide low-cost yet fun ways that our students can learn computational thinking. Over many years of organizing coding clubs, we have that kids love robots! When designed thoughtfully, robots combine motion, color, sounds and displays that engage students more than any other teaching tool we have tested.

But in the past, even simple robots offered by retailers and promoted by commercial companies were designed first to increase their stockholder value and second to provide learning value. A typical price for a retail robot kit is $370. They often justify this cost because they claim that the lesson plans and program examples took millions of dollars to create. But generative AI is changing this. Today we have tools that can generate customized lesson plans including working programs for a small fraction of these costs.

We have heard many stories of schools that can't afford to give each student their own robot. But at $19 per robot, we can enable many schools to dramatically decrease the robot-to-student ratios.

This site started in 2014 with our experiments on watching kids use these projects. Every year we would make small changes to increase the fun and lower the cost. We are convinced you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars per robot to create a fun and engaging experience that provides a measurable improvement in STEM engagement and interest in coding.

Metrics for a Great STEM Robotics Curriculum

We use ChatGPT to come up with a way to measure the value of a STEM robotics system. Here is the prompt:

Our school is fed up with vendors trying to sell us $350 STEM
robots kits that use cheep parts and batteries that are not
replaceable. How can we come up with a simple set of objective
measures to rate the quality of STEM robots?  Include the
quality of instruction manuals and curriculum that can be
customized to the needs of teachers, volunteers and students.

Return the results in markdown level three headers.

Here is the response:

Developing objective measures to evaluate the quality of STEM robots, including the quality of instruction manuals and customizable curricula, is a great way to ensure value for money and educational effectiveness. Here are some key criteria you could consider:

Hardware Quality

  • Durability: Assess the robustness of the robot's construction. Are the materials used sturdy enough for repeated use by students?
  • Modularity: Consider whether parts can be easily added or removed, which can aid in teaching different levels of complexity.
  • Battery Life and Replacement: Check the battery life per charge and ensure that batteries are replaceable and reasonably priced.
  • Sensor and Actuator Quality: Evaluate the performance and reliability of sensors and actuators, as these are crucial for the functionality of the robot.

Cost Effectiveness

  • Initial Cost vs. Part Quality: Compare the cost of the robot with the quality and longevity of the components used.
  • Maintenance Costs: Consider long-term costs related to maintenance, part replacement, and upgrades.

Ease of Use

  • User-Friendly Design: Is the robot easy to assemble and disassemble? This is important for younger students or those new to robotics.
  • Documentation: Look for clear, comprehensive, and well-organized instruction manuals that cater to different skill levels.

Educational Value

  • Curriculum Integration: Evaluate how well the robot's features align with educational standards and curricular goals. Can it be integrated into subjects beyond technology, such as math, science, or arts?
  • Progressive Learning: Does the robot offer different levels of complexity for varied learning stages? This is essential to cater to both beginners and advanced students.
  • Problem-Solving and Creativity: Assess if the robot challenges students to solve real problems and encourages creativity.

Customizability

  • Software Customization: Check if the software can be easily modified or programmed by teachers and students. Support for multiple programming languages can be a plus.
  • Hardware Customization: Determine if it's possible to modify or expand the hardware to meet different teaching needs or student projects.

Support and Community

  • Technical Support: Reliable and accessible customer support is crucial for troubleshooting and guidance.
  • Community Resources: A strong user community can provide valuable support and resources such as shared lesson plans, tutorials, and project ideas.

Feedback and Reviews

  • User Feedback: Gather feedback from other educators who have used the robots. User reviews can provide insights into reliability, usability, and educational impact.
  • Pilot Testing: Consider conducting a pilot test with a few robots in your school to see how they perform in real educational settings and gather firsthand feedback.

By establishing a rubric based on these categories, your school can systematically evaluate different STEM robots and select those that offer the best learning potential and value for money. This approach not only helps in making informed purchasing decisions but also supports the educational goals of your STEM programs.

Why We Built This Website: Our Journey

Our journey to build an awesome STEM robotics website began with a simple blog post back in 2014 about repairing the motors in our old Arduino kits.
Our insight was that by using a simple cable tie and some heat shrink, we prevented the kids from breaking the wires to our motors. This little change lowered the frustration of broken kits and allowed our labs with motors to be reliable. Sometimes little changes make a big difference.

We started wondering if other schools were also having these problems. Why didn't the people who supplied these kits realize how fragile the parts were? Why did they skimp on quality and cause their kits to break so easily?

This was the first step on our journey.

Our First Robot

Yes, kids love color and motion! Robot classes were usually the first classes to get full. However, we were frustrated by the closed Finch Robots and here that were unreliable and had no way to extend motors and sensors. So we thought about building our own robot.

We did some research and ordered some random parts from Amazon. We used a four-motor chassis, a $35 Arduino Uno and a motor controller. It turns out that we only needed two motors by the way. The total price was almost $70. But our students loved the way we had a breadboard on the top so they could add their own lights and sensors. It was a hit! But looking back, all those wires were difficult for the kids to get right. Pulling one wire out would make the robot stop working.

The Uno Robot: Cutting Costs and Increasing Content

After talking to several others in the Minnesota Arduino club we came across a relatively low-cost Arduino Nano that could be mounted directly on the breadboard. The Uno Robot was only about $30 and was far more extensible than any of the commercial robots schools were buying! We also started putting our lesson plans on GitHub to make it easier for other organizations to reuse our content.

But the Arduino Uno ecosystem was not kind. The lower-cost Arduino Uno chips used a driver that was not supported and each new release of the MacOS would make our drivers difficult to install. It required admin rights to install software and it was impossible for our students to use some of their home computers. Despite frequent posts to the Arduino community, nothing was done because the drivers were not supported and they wanted us to pay $35 for the official Arduino hardware. We were looking for options. We also wanted to use Python which had become the de facto first language for most high schools The change finally happened in January 2021!

The Switch to Raspberry Pi Pico and MicroPython

The announcement of the Raspberry Pi Pico rocked our world. Not only was it only $4, but it also fit right on our breadboard! It ran MicroPython and had the massive support of the entire Raspberry Pi Foundation behind it. We knew we had a solid partner who would not try to hijack our education to line the pockets of their shareholders.

By May of 2021 we had started to upgrade old Arduino Nano robots to the Raspberry Pi Pico. We had a robot that had over 100 times as much RAM and cost 1/8 of the Arduino UNO!

By June of 2021 we were sending out robot kits to our COVID-era students in their homes.

Much of the content for this site has migrated from the amazing MicroPython for Kids website. Although there is a lot of useful content on that site, some of our most popular STEM robot content has got buried deep within the Kits structures. So we decided that the STEM robot really needed its own separate site. Our site will still link to the relevant pages on that site.

The Raspberry Pi Pico was not perfect. Because the pin labels were on the bottom of the board we could not read any of them when they were on the breadboard. This little "oversight" cause endless hours of headache by forcing us to put colored marks on all our breadboards and print out pin diagrams. But wait. There is more!

The Cytron RP2040 Board

The next big advance came from a brilliant engineer from Malaysia who worked at Cytron. He developed the Cytron Maker Pi RP2040. This $12 board is so complete that has entirely changed the ease of use of our robots. Everything we need is included on the board including buttons and LED to test motor connections, a speaker and user programmable buttons. WOW! Now students had far fewer wires to connect and fewer things that could go wrong. We have eliminated all the need for soldering. We could now spend more time learning to code and teach computational thinking.

The Time of Flight Sensor

The last small addition to our robot was to upgrade the front distance sensor from the old and fragile ultrasonic ping distance sensor to the new shiny time-of-flight sensor. This sensor uses the I2C bus and has both accuracy and response times that are far better then the ultrasonic sensors. They are also about the same price - about $3 each.

The Rise of Generative AI

In December of 2022, ChatGPT rocked the world by being able to generate large blocks of high-quality content just by giving it a small prompt. Although we had been writing about generating lesson plans since 2020, many people ignored us. But after ChatGPT came out everything changed. We were teaching classes on how to generate highly personalized lesson plans for not just STEM robotics classes but for many other topics in schools.

Adding MicroSims

We can also use Generative AI to create online simulators to help our students visualize what is going on within our robot. For example, many students have a difficult time visualizing how pulse-width modulation works. This simple MicroSim is allowing us to hyper-personalize both lesson plans as well as interactive simulations that are generated by teachers and run in your browser.

We now have also included sample Python scripts so that you can generate high-quality lesson plans on many topics in the course for any grade level.

Conclusion

Here is a summary of what we learned:

  1. Open systems are more sustainable
  2. Vendors focus on selling you new robots, not building maintainable STEM robots
  3. Using interchangeable parts will lower your maintenance and repair costs
  4. Teach breadboarding skills early
  5. Python rocks
  6. Generating lesson plans, sample code, and simulations is revolutionizing STEM robots
  7. Invest in your community and support open-source content

Good Luck!