Using LEGO Mindstorms to Engage Students on Algorithm Design Ainhoa Álvarez, Mikel Larrañaga Department of Languages and Computer Systems University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country {ainhoa.alvarez, mikel.larranaga}@ehu.es Students on Basic Programming courses often have difficulties with program design tasks. This problem mainly arises from their lack of program solving skills. To overcome this lack, students’ need to practice. Manipulating real entities can be a useful and motivating strategy to engage students in such endeavor. In this context, several authors have used LEGO Mindstorms robots to help students on basic programming courses. In this paper, we present the results obtained from an experience conducted on a Basic Programming course using those robots to motivate students and to involve them in algorithm design. Basic Programming; increase student motivation; LEGO Mindstorm I. INTRODUCTION Basic Programming is a first year mandatory course for the Computer Engineering degree at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). This course is the first contact many students have with programming, which is an essential and core topic of the degree. This course primarily centers on providing the students with the essential programming skills, giving a great importance to the analysis and algorithm construction phases using both pseudo-code and flow charts. Despite being aware of how the Basic Programming course relates to Computer Engineering, students may feel disappointed as algorithm construction, and especially some of the proposed exercises, are far from what they expected from the course. Therefore, engaging students on algorithm design is a hard task as most first year students are not aware of its relevance, and are expecting to start coding as soon as possible. Moreover, some students already have some programming experience and it is still even more difficult to motivate them on design tasks. These facts might be some of the main reasons for first year students to drop out of the course. LEGO Mindstorms are programmable robots aimed at fomenting reflection, analytical thinking and problem-solving skills in children. They are provided with a graphic environment that allows programming the robots to perform simple tasks by means of graphical elements similar to those of flow charts. Our working hypothesis is that using this kind of robots in Basic Programming can lighten the learning curve for newcomers on programming and might also increase the motivation of the students. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors have been using LEGO Mindstorms robots for two academic years in the Basic Programming course. After the positive comments received from students and the perception of the teachers the first year, a more detailed experiment has been developed on the second year. The results of that experience are presented throughout this paper. The paper is organized as follows: first, some preliminary experiments on using LEGO Mindstorms for programming courses and how they might improve learning are described. More details of the LEGO Mindstorms are procured in Section III. The conducted experiment is depicted in Section IV. The results and discussion of this experiment are presented in Section V. Finally, the conclusions and future work are portrayed. II. LEGO MINDSTORMS FOR PROGRAMMING COURSES To master Basic Programming, students need both declarative and procedural knowledge. The first one is related to the syntax and semantics of programming languages and the second is related to problem solving and program design skills [1]. The main problem students have is related to the second kind of required knowledge; their problem begins at the first phase, when “Students have to understand and apply abstract programming concepts to create algorithms to solve concrete problems” [2]. A main solution for this learning/teaching process is to help students to obtain a good problem solving basis [2] to which end practicing is essential [3]. Considering these statements, several efforts have been carried out using LEGO Mindstorms robots as a means to increase students’ motivation, interaction and retention [4], [5]. These experiences indicate that students acquire basic concepts in an easier way using robots [6]. It is worth mentioning that some authors have done studies in which the robots were used for all the practical sessions of the course and the obtained result was that students’ using the robots had even worse results than those obtained by the 978-1-4673-5261-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE