LearnBlock: A Robot-Agnostic Educational Programming Tool

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 30012 - 30026
• Main Authors: Bachiller-Burgos, Pilar, Barbecho, Ivan, Calderita, Luis V., Bustos, Pablo, Manso, Luis J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Block codes; Computer architecture; Computer languages; Curricula; Education; Educational tool; learning programming; Programming environments; Programming languages; Programming profession; Robot sensing systems; robot-agnostic; Robotics; Robots; Software; software architecture; Software development tools; Technical education
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2972410

Education is evolving to prepare students for the current sociotechnical changes. An increasing effort to introduce programming and other STEM-related subjects into the core curriculum of primary and secondary education is taking place around the world. The use of robots stands out among STEM initiatives, since robots are proving to be an engaging tool for learning programming and other STEM-related contents. Block-based programming is the option chosen for most educational robotic platforms. However, many robotics kits include their own software tools, as well as their own set of programming blocks. LearnBlock, a new educational programming tool, is proposed here. Its major novelty is its loosely coupled software architecture which makes it, to the best of our knowledge, the first robot-agnostic educational tool. Robot-agnosticism is provided not only in block code, but also in generated code, unifying the translation from blocks to the final programming language. The set of blocks can be easily extended implementing additional Python functions, without modifying the core code of the tool. Moreover, LearnBlock provides an integrated educational programming environment that facilitates a progressive transition from a visual to a general-purpose programming language. To evaluate LearnBlock and demonstrate that it is platform-agnostic, several tests were conducted. Each of them consists of a program implementing a robot behaviour. The block code of each test can run on several educational robots without changes.