RoPE

About the project

The RoPE, Educational Programmable Robot, is a programming toy that allows children from the age of 3 to start having contact with computational thinking. Children program the Rope through colored buttons on its head that represent the directions and trajectory the toy should follow. Rope helps you to develop logic and math concepts relevant to your age group, such as: observing, visualizing and describing positions, directions and movements using common words; recognize straight line movements and rotations, combining them in simple situations (for example going to a place in the room) and recognizing right angles, making estimates, associating the number with quantities and others.

The robot has four directional buttons (left, right, forward and backward) and an action button, which makes RoPE execute the selected paths. To carry out the activities with the children, pedagogical mats are used. The mat suggests activities that can work with geometric shapes, numerals and playful situations of interest to teachers. As the little robot has sounds for each different action, visually impaired children will also be able to play and learn with it.

Rope is the result of more than 5 years of interdisciplinary research developed at LITE and with the support of the Public Ministry of Balneário Camboriú in 2017, it began to be distributed in the municipality's early childhood education centers.

My involvement

In this project I was awarded a scholarship during my graduation in Computer Science. I worked on the development of the robot's software, which is written in Arduino. In addition, I worked on the development of the printed circuit boards of the robot with Eagle (button input and sound output).

Technologies

• Arduino
• Eagle
• C