Robotics is a fun and inquisitive discipline that offers plenty of opportunities to students for solution diversity, critical thinking, creativity, iterative thinking, and collaboration. Despite these ample benefits, a major setback in implementing robotics education in Nepali schools has been the high cost of the resources needed to run such lessons, including added cost for computing devices like a computer or a tablet.
In addition to the barrier of cost, schools also don’t have access to human resources that are capable of designing and implementing robotics programs in the schools. Many teachers have misconceptions about the discipline, thinking of robots solely as humanoid machines and they view it as a discipline that is extremely difficult to learn and teach.
To address the problems mentioned above we created affordable versions of smart motors. Smart motors are trainable motors developed by Milan Dahal as part of his PhD research at Tufts university Education and outreach (CEEO). In addition to the smart motors, we’ve created a guide for schools to use the Smart Motors to introduce the concepts of robotics to the students.
The resource development was supported by Tufts University.
If you are interested in replicating our work, you are welcome to check out the program we have written for our version of smart motors.
https://github.com/Thesuryagyawali/Smart-Motors-with-arduino
A step by step guide to help students get familiar with the smart motor interface and get started with using the smart motors.
#Smartmotors tutorial.docx.pdf
Students use smart motors to build a model that replicates the movement of the pitcher plant.
Students use smart motors to build a model of the human arm that shows the working of biceps and triceps muscles.