Introducing students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines at an early age has been the focus of several efforts in recent years—NASA, Code.org, FIRST. A popular approach has been to use educational robots, such as the Boe-Bot, and robotics competitions hosted by organizations—FIRST and VEX—as a catalyst for engaging students and teaching them about STEM disciplines. While using robotics as an educational tool seems to be effective, this approach can be cost prohibitive. To overcome this issue, we have developed an inexpensive educational robot with the goals of teaching programming methodology, basic electronics, and analytical thought. This robot can be mass produced for about $20, has freely available source code and hardware files, is controlled remotely by a computer (such as the Raspberry Pi) with little computation being done by the robot, and has an emphasis on being easy to use and program.

Accompanying the robot, there is a programming workspace, we developed, with MIT’s OpenBlocks library, which is similar to Scratch. Unlike other inexpensive robots, the BayouBot has multiple digital I/O ports for custom electronics that allows it to be adapted to accomplish various tasks and is capable of wireless Bluetooth communications. This wireless capability allows students to program the robot in our workspace and then wirelessly transmit instructions to the robot for execution, which makes programming more seamless and less tedious for students. By combining this robot with a website similar to Code.org and other educational materials, we hope to make robotics education more accessible. The hardware designs and source code can be found here at github.com/boubre/BayouBot