LinkBricks: A Construction Kit for Intuitively Creating and Programming Interactive Robots

Abstract

This paper presents LinkBricks, a creative construction kit for intuitively creating and programming interactive robots towards young children. Integrating building blocks, a hierarchical programming framework and a tablet application, this kit is proposed to maintain the low floor and wide walls for children who lack knowledge in conventional programming. The blocks have LEGO-compatible interlock structures and are embedded with various wireless sensors and actuators to create different interactive robots. The programming application is easy-to-use and provides heuristics to involve children in the creative activities. A preliminary evaluation is conducted and indicates that LinkBricks increases young children's engagement with, comfort with, and interest in working with interactive robots. Meanwhile, it has the potential of helping them to learn the concepts of programming and robots.