Graphical Programming Environments for Educational Robots: Open Roberta - Yet another One? Beate Jost, Markus Ketterl, Reinhard Budde, Thorsten Leimbach Fraunhofer IAIS Schloss Birlinghoven 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany {Beate.Jost, Markus.Ketterl, Reinhard.Budde, Thorsten.Leimbach} @iais.fraunhofer.de Abstract In recent years, an increasing number of school children is beginning to learn about robotics in the classroom in order to stir their interest in STEM professions. Teachers rely on simple educational robots and intuitive programming environments and graphical programming environments have become a frequent starting point for young robotics newbies. However, currently available tools do often not sufficiently support teachers and students in the classroom. In this study, we evaluate programming environments for educational robots; our results point to the need of lowering the com- plexity of tools as well as of incorporating combinations of web and cloud technologies, embedded systems and communication concepts into these environments. The technical part of this work presents Open Roberta – an open source based addition to commercial educational robot environments that addresses these needs. 1 Introduction The Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) domain is growing rapidly in our working world but children leaving school today are rarely interested in technical professions. There are many different at- tempts to overcome this barrier. One increasingly used approach is learning with educational robots in class- rooms. Researchers and developers have done a com- petent job since the first inception of classroom turtle programming back in the 1970’s [16], [7]. Kelleher and Pausch [10] have already worked out that Educational robots are highly motivating for boys and girls hence keeping this motivation on a high level for children and for teachers is essential. Manifold educational robotic system have been invented or enhanced during the last years. But did they really take into consideration what teachers, the main multipliers, really need - especially in the classroom? Nowadays interdisciplinary teaching is the way teach- ers promote the school children’s technical competence. These teachers are not necessarily math, physics or computer science experts. Quite often they are respon- sible for different school subjects or are primary school teachers. Certainly some of the interested teachers al- ready know how to interact successfully with different (education) robotic platforms, programming languages and corresponding coding environments but there is a significant amount of teachers without basic knowledge. With the Roberta - Learning with Robots initia- tive Fraunhofer IAIS has developed and implemented a growing concept to assist lectures and teachers directly in the classroom with workshops and practical re-usable tutorials back in 2002. These hands-on programming and guiding materials are growing on a daily basis and can be applied directly in a curriculum. Roberta espe- cially targets the lack of engineers in general but with a focus on female engineers in Germany and other Euro- pean countries by raising children’s interest in technical professions [5]. With Roberta, annually over 35.000 pupils participate in the program and more then 250 teachers are becoming certified instructors each year. These teacher trainings are being evaluated regularly in order to improve the program and adjust to changing demands (see table 1). V. good Good Satisfying Not Satisfying Total 67,94% 29,56% 2,50% 0% 100% 462 201 17 0 680 Table 1. Results of the Roberta teacher train- ing evaluation (from 2008-2013) [11] 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 978-0-7695-5437-2/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ISM.2014.24 381 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 978-0-7695-5437-2/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ISM.2014.24 381