I was really interested when I stumbled across this robot. This floor robot has the greatest functionality of all floor robots with an extension programming language which makes it suitable for KS5 work. I think this should be explored as a KS3 to KS4 programming challenge.
Here is the release video:
This shows you something of the visual programming environment:
However it does not do the system justice as a better description can be found on this blog
check this reblog http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/your-kid-wants-a-thymio-ii-education-robot
The Thymio II comes from those robot geniuses at EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland. It’s an educational robot designed from the ground up to be easy and fun to mess with for people with very limited (or no) previous experience in robotics. It’s also designed from the ground up to be cheap, at just about $100 USD. How is this possible, you ask? Apparently, there’s pretty much no profit margin or distribution cost, and all you’re paying for is the hardware and for some people to put it together for you into a working robot. Not too shabby. And this robot comes with a bunch of sensors and other goodies:
Yes, there’s a trailer hook. So you can stop worrying about that. And those “mechanic fixation” points are Lego compatible. To program Thymio II, you can use a nifty graphical interface, or a simple programming language called Aseba that’s similar to Matlab. And oh hey did we mention that this thing is open source from source code to hardware? ‘Cause it is.
Seriously, $100 seems very cheap for a platform like this. It’s cheap enough that a $1,000 grant could outfit an entire classroom with robots that are colorful, versatile, fun, and can be tackled with a GUI before graduating to writing code. There’s lots more info along with examples of what Thymio II can do in a wiki that you can check out here, and you can adopt one of your own at the link below.
makingpi 