2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The area of robotics has become an integral component in modern society for performing a wide array of tasks, such as industrial assembly lines, food manufacturing, agricultural automation, and healthcare. To develop tomorrow’s workforce, we need to encourage students to take up education and profession in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. There can be no substitute for developing essential skills, especially in robotics, at an early educational stage. Educational settings often use “do-it-yourself” kits to introduce and train students on a new topic or area. Students can learn and gain experience from using several modules or components in such kits. However, many commercially available educational robotics kits could be made affordable for purchase, especially by underserved or low-income communities. Additionally, such kits could greatly benefit from guided instruction modules and added reconfigurability, which is currently absent from many of the designs. Students, thereby, lose interest after a set number of ‘games’ or due to a lack of guidance. This work focuses on developing a cost-effective solution (~$60) that can foster essential skills —for example, analytical, logical thinking, programming, and engineering— as well as spark creativity and motivation in future roboticists. The prototype kit, targeted toward middle and high school students both inside and outside of classroom environments, would assist them in learning to develop and control robots for relevant applications. Using various components including 3D-printed building blocks, the design provides reconfigurability in three separate options: a small-scale foosball table with a programmable ‘kicking leg’, an autonomous car, and a humanoid robot. Guided by a preliminary lesson plan developed in consultation with educators for different age groups, students can take their first steps towards learning to program a microcontroller-based robot, access an array of low-cost sensors for sensing the ambient environment, and control actuators (like motors) to have the robot perform specific actions. This will potentially strengthen their knowledge and interest in robotics, and more broadly, STEM.