A Semi-Attending Robotics Course Proposal: An On-line Platform and set of In-Person Meetings For Teaching Robotics using Lego Mindstorms EV3

The application of robotics as an instrument for boosting the learning process inside classrooms is nowadays a quite reachable reality. The participatory method, in which students and tutors cooperate among themselves for pursuing knowledge, reveals itself as an increasingly easer and didactic manner of passing on knowledge in class. Making use of this learning method, and the interest of the youth for the technological field, a semi-attending robotics course has been delivered by students of the Universidade Federal do Ceará to students and teachers from the public schools’ system in the municipality of Sobral, State of Ceará, in partnership with the UFC Virtual Institute and the Education Office of Sobral (SEDUC). It is common that students of secondary education lose interest and feel discouraged when studying some school subjects, because of their abstract nature. Aiming for aiding the teaching of these subjects, such as mathematics, physics and computer programming, Educational Robotics was used as an effort for making such subjects more interesting and easier to grasp, dynamizing their studying. This project aimed to introduce basic notions about robotics making use of the Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit, with aid of SOLAR, an online platform where the e-learning classes were taught, and the utilization of a visual language for programming the robots, part of the software bundled with the Lego Mindstorms Ev3 kit.  The in-person meetings were carried out every last weekend of each month, so that the students could practice programming the Lego Mindstorms and put into use what they had learned in the virtual classes beforehand. At the end of the course, when all the students already had the skills for programming the robotics kit, a competition was held with the intent of harvesting the results obtained over the duration of the course. The teams with best performance were awarded medals and trophies, as recognition of the effort they put in. The participants were also encouraged to keep studying and improving their knowledge of robotics after the end of the course.