This paper introduces the use of a flexible and affordable educational robot specifically developed for the practical experimentation inherent to technological disciplines. The robot has been designed to be reconfigurable and extendible, serving as an experimental platform across several undergraduate courses. As most students have a mobile cell phone, this was used as the main control computer for the so-called CellBot, thus avoiding any need to deal with the details of microcontrollers or other embedded computing devices. Assessment results are also presented, based on a pre- and post-survey of student opinion administered to 204 science and engineering students from several universities. Among the conclusions are that 83% of the students prefer to use these low-cost robots as tools to improve their learning of the theory in several disciplines, and 71% of the students stated that they prefer to have their own robot to experiment with, instead of using a didactic kit loaned to them by the university.

In this paper, we reflect upon the employment of educational robotics as a tool to help the learning process inside elementary school. The primary objective is to introduce an environment for educational robotics, creating a basis for adoption of new educational methods. Based on such technological tools, we came out with a motivating and innovative instrument in the process of teaching and learning that can be used as a tool against digital exclusion. We show experiments and results of a digital inclusion project running at the periphery of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The main objective is to lead children to learn about and accept the new technological resources, in this case computers and robots. We report the learning process of digitally excluded children as well as the benefits of educational robotics in the intellectual formation of marginalized children in Brazilian society. We verify, in practice, that robots and computer can be combined as a very nice tool to enrich and stimulate the teaching work, optimizing the pedagogical practice. This is a social initiative that certainly benefits present and future generations.

We proposes an educational assistive methodology aiming to provide the access to educational robotics activities to students with visual impairments or low vision. As an approach to soften the main issues related to this challenging problem, we introduce a low cost, assistive technology, called CardBot 2.0. Basically, this model for teaching-learning is composed by a programming environment, a mobile application, and several geometric cards, each of them representing a specific action that is recognized by the application with a tag. So, the student can program the robot by selecting and organizing geometric cards on the surface of a board or on a table. Also a contribution of this work being part of the solution, the professor can create new cards and register the respective actions and tags. This allows the professor to add new actions for the robot or even to create a new language. We validated our approach by performing experimental classes for students with different visual impairments and ages, and for students without impairment, with an analysis of the results, qualitative.

This article introduces the successful methodology adopted for the realization of the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad. Organizational and scientific issues are presented and discussed as well as results of statistical surveys performed with participants that verify the benefits brought by this robotics Olympiad. The Brazilian Robotics Olympiad is a nine-year-old nation-wide initiative created with the mission of promoting robotics among Brazilian students with or without previous knowledge of robotics, fostering their interest to engage in science, technology and engineering studies and careers. The Olympiad is fully free for participants, being annually organized by hundreds of volunteers from several Brazilian universities. It is divided into practical and theoretical components with several levels, each one designed for a certain student age. More than 300,000 students have already participated in the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad and, according to 58% of these students, the Brazilian Robotics Olympiad helped them to decide which university course to pursue.

This paper proposes to use visual features matching in the identification of medicine boxes for visually impaired people. We use a camera device, available in several popular devices such as computers, televisions and cell phones, to identify relevant features on medicine box. After box detection, audio files are played to inform about dosage, indications and contraindications of the medication. Making use of this vision system can help many visually impaired people to take the right medicine at the time indicated in advance by the doctor. Experiments with 15 blindfolded volunteers demonstrated that 93% of them believes that the system was useful or very useful to identify the medicine boxes.