Think Globally, Build Locally: a Technological Platform for Low-Cost, Open-Source, Locally-Assembled Programmable Bricks for Education Arnan Sipitakiat Chiang Mai University Muang, Chiang Mai, 50200, Thailand
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Paulo Blikstein Stanford University 520 Galvez Mall – Stanford, CA, 94305 – USA
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ABSTRACT
that probeware and educational robotics became popular (for example, the Handy Cricket and the Lego Mindstorms kit, [3, 6]). Recently, the Lego NXT kit, the Pico Cricket and the MIT Tower [2] have incorporated new features based on advanced sensing and modular design.
“Programmable bricks” are microcontroller-based devices that can be used in various educational projects, such as robotic prototypes, environmental sensing, and interactive art. They have been used in educational settings for many years, but particularly in developing countries their penetration has been limited due either to unavailability or prohibitive cost. In this paper, we discuss recent work on the GoGo Board, an open-source, extensible, low-cost programmable brick mainly designed for developing countries. We discuss the board’s main design principles, which were based on our extensive fieldwork, as well as implication for learning activities, the use of low-cost materials, and local construction of boards. We use data and observations from studies in several countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand.
Despite the educational benefits of probeware and robotics [3, 5, 7, 8], their use has been limited to well-funded schools and organizations due to their prohibitive cost and limited availability, particularly outside the United States and Europe. We have observed students who would not engage in the activities for fear of breaking the equipment and being financially liable, and teachers who would vocally criticize the spending of thousands of dollars to benefit just a small number of students [7]. In this paper, we present a technology to tackle those difficulties: the GoGo Board (see figure 1), a low-cost, open-source platform for probeware and robotics, tailored for educational use in developing nations. The platform is composed of the board architecture itself, an I2C-based standard for add-ons miniboards (such as displays, amplifiers, and wireless communication), libraries for most programming environments, and a collaborative website with documentation and sample projects from the user community. We discuss the design choices that made the board low-cost, multi-purpose, easy to assemble, and easy to be used with scrap electronics and inexpensive off-theshelf sensors and construction materials.
Author Keywords
Construction kits, open-source, constructionism, educational robotics, probeware, appropriate technologies. ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information Miscellaneous.
interfaces
and
presentation:
General Terms
Design, Human Factors, Experimentation. PROGRAMMABLE BRICKS LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
AND
THEIR
USE
IN
Probeware (i.e., data acquisition devices) has a long history in educational settings, since Bill Walton’s Calculator and Laboratory Calculus at EDC in the early 70s [8]. Around the same time, Seymour Papert first envisioned the use of programmable robotics with children [4]. However, it was not until the late 80s and early 90s, when designers started to create products especially tailored for use in education Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. TEI-2010, January 24-27, 2010, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-841-4/10/01...$10.00.
Figure 1: The GoGo board. GOGOBOARD DESIGN PRINCIPLES Dual-mode
Our field observations in several school systems revealed that probeware and robotics have traditionally employed
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different hardware solutions [7]. This is disadvantageous in many respects: first, it burdens schools with extra expenses and training; secondly, it separates robotics and science experimentation into separate activities. Therefore, one important design decision was to integrate both functions into one single platform. In the autonomous mode, the student writes a program and downloads it to the board’s memory, which can then operate disconnected from the computer (to control robots, for example). In the tethered mode, the board remains connected to the computer at all times, providing high speed sensing and control capabilities for any programming language supporting serial communication (libraries have been developed for Microworlds Logo, Imagine Logo, Squeak, NetLogo, Microsoft Visual Studio, VBA, Macromedia Director, and Java). As a result, students can develop scientific experiments or sophisticated interactive systems which rely on the higher processing power of the computer and the high speed serial link (see, for example, [1]).
example, undergraduate students in Brazil created their own version of the board with different connectors and a larger circuit board better adapted to their use, and partnered with a local store to sell them.
Figure 2: From scratch to project (left to right): a scanner made into silkscreen light table; a printed circuit board in the corrosion bath, a student soldering the board, and a finished project (a solar panel with a solar seeking mechanism). CONCLUSION
Although the educational benefits of programmable bricks for robotics, environmental sensing, and scientific experimentation have been widely acknowledged in the past decade, the GoGo Board is attempting to put this learning opportunities into the hands of learners in places where accessibility and high cost has previously prohibited them. Our results show that designing for low-cost, local assembly, and open-source had a significant impact on adoption and use in developing countries.
Low-cost and local construction
Our field work indicated that importing equipment from the USA or Europe more than doubles the local cost in many countries. Therefore, we designed the platform to be assembled locally, if needed. We did extensive research for component availability in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Malaysia, and replaced all the components which could not be easily locally found. Also, the platform has been designed to make its construction process as simple as possible. It does not incorporate the most cutting edge features found in other commercial products: the most advanced is not necessarily the best for high availability in educational settings. For example, the board uses a simple but widely available microcontroller rather than more powerful ones, which are arduous to find abroad, even being closely priced. Also, it uses human-sized components, wide traces on a single sided printed circuit board, as well as simple, inexpensive and non-proprietary sensor connectors, being compatible with virtually all brands and types of sensors. These choices contribute to the low cost of production and ownership. While the Lego Mindstorms kit can reach as much as US$ 250 in the US and US$ 500 in developing countries (due to import taxes), the GoGo Board costs approximately US$ 35. By allowing users (an individual or an organization) to construct them locally, we blur the boundary between consumers and producers of technology, and make maintenance and support much cheaper. In many locations, students themselves build their own boards, using improvised equipment (see Figure 2) – and our data indicates than simply assembling the boards has a significant impact on their sense of technological competence and self-efficacy.
REFERENCES
1. Blikstein, P., & Wilensky, U. (2006). The Missing Link: A Case Study of Sensing-and-Modeling Toolkits for Constructionist Scientific Investigation. Proceedings of the 6th IEEE ICALT, pp. 980-982. 2. Lyon, C. (2003), Encouraging Innovation by Engineering the Learning Curve. Cambridge, MA: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Master’s Thesis, MIT. 3. Martin F., and Resnick M. (1993). “LEGO/Logo and Electronic Bricks: Creating a Scienceland for Children”, Advanced Educational Technologies for Mathematics and Science. Springer. 4. Papert, S. (1971). “Teaching children thinking”. MIT Artificial Laboratory Memo #247, MIT, Cambridge. 5. Resnick, M., Berg, R., & Eisenberg, M. (2000). “Beyond Black Boxes: Bringing Transparency and Aesthetics Back to Scientific Investigation”, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9 (1), pp. 7-30. 6. Sargent, R. (1995). The Programmable LEGO Brick: Ubiquitous Computing for Kids. Cambridge, MA: Media Laboratory Master’s Thesis, MIT.
Open source
7. Sipitakiat, A., Blikstein, P., & Cavallo, D. Moving towards highly available computational tools in learning environments. Proceedings of ICLS 2004, USA.
There are over 2,000 GoGo Boards being used worldwide, two major international foundations adopting it, and a growing user community of hundreds of students and hobbyists in more than 10 countries. Being an open-source project, users customize the board to their own use. For
8. Tinker, R. (2000). A History of Probeware. Retrieved from http://www.concord.org/publications/detail.
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