SPArK-Bot: An Educational Robotic Platform

The subjects of programming and robotics are quintessential subjects in today’s world. The use of development boards like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are making huge inroads into schools where they are used to teach the aforementioned subjects. But as the study explored, better interfaces can be built to simplify its ease of use and that is the motivation that has led to the development of the ‘SPArK-Bot’ - an all-batteries-included educational robot that has the versatility of the Raspberry Pi with the simplicity of the Arduino all combined in a package that incentivizes the students to practice programming in a hands-on manner. Using standard hardware, but presenting them in a simple, fault tolerant way with tutorials to guide the students every step of the way resulted in a positive reaction from our evaluators with it scoring a perfect ‘A Grade’ on the System Usability Scale (SUS). These evaluators include school students who are new to programming and college students who are well versed with the basics of programming. The college going students find that they can test out their ideas and easily prototype their proof of concept solutions and even use it in competitions. This system can be incorporated into existing curriculum and holistically help raise the bar for practical exposure and learning in this domain.