Finding your bot-mate: criteria for evaluating robot kits for use in undergraduate computer science education

Abstract

Robotics can provide an interdisciplinary framework for teaching computer science. This paper describes a set of criteria for judging the utility of robot kits for CS education. We use these criteria to compare three robot kits and their programming environments, specifically with respect to ease of use, flexibility, extensibility, documentation, and on-line community. The three systems we evaluate are the Lego Mindstorms, the iRobot Create, and the Parallax Scribbler.