5 Best Educational Robots For STEM Class

The concept of using educational robots for teaching children is becoming very popular these days worldwide. These robots are fun to work with and help students learn STEM concepts easily. It prepares them for higher studies, for which good fundamental programming knowledge is a must. Students can control these educational robots using apps, gestures, and voice.

Building robots from kits and programming them helps children develop engineering and computational skills. It builds cognitive abilities like logical thinking and problem solving and improves their creative skills.

There are many educational robots that are being widely used everywhere, but the following five are the most popular amongst them:

DJI RoboMaster EP Core

This robot allows students to work on projects that are based on AI Intelligence and programming. It focuses mainly on STEM education for students. The main advantage of the EP Core is the robotic arm, which is flexible and allows students to finish their tasks even with the objects out of sight. The other important feature is the four Mecanum Wheels with 12 rollers that permit omnidirectional movement.

The Servo, which gives high performance, lets students use their Physics knowledge to develop the lifting structure. With the Power Connector Module, students can connect external hardware and develop their own programs. The Intelligent Controller supports functions like AI computing. The DJI RoboMaster is compatible with third-party open-source hardware, including Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

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Root

This robot, a product of Harvard University, teaches students the basic of coding. It comes with more than 50 sensors and actuator motors. Students can use magnets to operate it on vertical surfaces like whiteboards. They can assign tasks like avoiding specific colours or follow lines.

The environment is fully graphical, allowing even kids who have not learned to read to develop programs. The robot lets students learn computer programming and allows them to watch the results of their programming instantly.

Dash and Dot

Kids love these pair of robots, which include Dash, the larger robot with a moveable head and wheels. Dot is the smaller one, and both robots come with a variety of sensors that react with anything the class puts for them. The sensors enable the robots to detect objects and help find them if they are moved.

You can have fun with these educational robots by making them perform activities like dancing. Students can select an app to control the robots, such as Blockly or Wonder, as per their learning level.

Ozobot Bit

This robot makes coding and logic skills fun to learn for students. You can use the robots to do simple tasks like moving around the room or perform complex tasks like dancing. Students can program it to do around 500 moves and tasks related to dance and music. You can draw colour-coded patterns called OzoCodes and make the robot react to different colours by performing different actions. This robot is ideal to teach students basic programming concepts and logical reasoning. The robot comes with software that can be used to teach the Ozobot new activities.

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Cubelets

It is another fun robot that can teach students the concepts of robotics in a simple way. You can create these robots by assembling different blocks or modules, where each block is a separate robot. Your cubelet kit will contain around 20 different blocks. Each block is assigned a different function, such as Think, Sense, and Action.

The purpose of Think blocks is to communicate commands to the entire robot. Sense Blocks contain sensors that react to touch, audio, or visual stimuli. Action Blocks are meant to let the robots respond and move. The best advantage of the Cubelet is that it lets even small kids without basic programming skills use their creative skills to assign tasks to robots. Students can assign more tasks to the robot by using Blockly, a powerful graphical application that is easy to use.

Conclusion

Educational robots are here to stay since they make the tough task of teaching kids STEM concepts easy and interesting. Robots help bring together science, technology, mathematics, and engineering and make these subjects easy to understand. They are excellent for kids who are not naturally inclined towards engineering and technology. The robots enable students to learn from the mistakes they make during programming and correct the errors on their own. Thus, it also develops their problem-solving abilities as well. Educational robots thus offer immense scope for students to understand how machines work and sharpen their STEM skills, preparing them for their future careers.