Engaging Secondary and Post-Secondary Students to Learn and Explore Programming Using a Theme-Based Curriculum and the Sphero SPRK+ Robot

The recent emergence of durable, low cost, and highly capable robots on the commercial market provides opportunity for engaging and highly motivational new curricula to teach computer programming and problem solving principles such as those typically found in a CS 0.5 course and those implementing the College Board's CS Principles curriculum framework. This paper documents a seventeen lesson curriculum based on the Sphero SPRK+ robot, the Sphero Edu development environment, and a motivating theme based upon the 2015 movie, The Martian. Along with the curriculum itself, discussion includes an experience report with a pilot run of the curriculum with two small sections of a freshman-level introduction to computing course aligned with the College Board's CS Principles curriculum framework. Initial results indicate great potential for highly engaging and effective pedagogy based on this approach. The results also reveal some practical challenges with implementing similar approaches based upon current and near-term technologies.