A New Set of Eyes and a New Pair of Legs: A Robust Learning Environment for Advanced High School Robotics

Tekkotsu is an open source application development framework for intelligent mobile robots. Originally designed for undergraduate computer science majors, recent refinements to the framework have led us to explore its use with high school students. We developed a pilot course curriculum to introduce high level robotics to students with little or no programming experience in a way that provides improved feedback and error detection on multiple levels. The use of visualization tools and pair programming techniques scaffolds the learning process and provides a systematic way to introduce robotics as a fun and worthwhile endeavor to novices, and helps instructors efficiently address students’ concerns in a real-time manner.