Roberta®
"Great, it works! My Roberta® is dancing!"
Roberta® (https://roberta-home.de ) uses the fascination of robots to teach students about science, technology and computer science in an exciting and hands-on way, offering a fun approach to computer science. The didactic Roberta® concept with extensive teaching and learning materials was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) (https://www.iais.fraunhofer.de/ ) with financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). More than 20 RobertaRegioCenters support the training of teachers to become Roberta Teachers for schools and universities, through which approximately 20000 children and young people come into contact with the programming of robots every year.
Girls conquer robots
The girls' fascinated faces show that programming can be fun. They have built a robot and taught it (or her?) to dance. The material for building the robots is provided by the Lego Mindstorm construction kits. A graphical programming language lets the robots walk, see, feel and hear in a short time. This allows them to move, recognize obstacles and react to sounds.
Roberta® courses at the HKA
LEGO Mindstorm construction kits are used in our Roberta courses. These provide easy access to the development of small, handy robots and thus offer a wide range of applications. Programming with the graphical environment requires no prior knowledge. Many feedbacks confirm that the course participants have a lot of fun building and programming the Robertas.
Initially, the focus of the courses was on the older female students (e.g. during the trial study in the fall vacations and for the NwT classes (9th grade) of the St. Dominikus Gymnasium Karlsruhe) with whom we advertised for a study of computer science/business informatics. However, it is known from gender research that girls like to deal with technology when they are still in a playful phase of life and are among themselves, especially when experimenting. We would like to promote this with the offer.