Enhancing Prototyping Skills of K-12 Students Through Lemon: A Bio-Inspired Robotics Kit

While the popularity of 3D printers and open-sourced materials and the subsequent demand for makers have increased at numerous educational facilities and fabrication laboratories in recent years, there are still many who have yet to utilize 3D printers, laser cutters, and other similar resources within the context of prototyping. This lack of skill and knowledge prevents the resources in such maker spaces from being used effectively. Our proposed project, “Lemon,” aims to fix this issue by providing an educational kit to standardize introductory education for modeling, mechanics, electronics, and programming. Thus, users can engage with all these concepts while enhancing their computational and design thinking skills, providing a solid introduction to prototyping and similar design processes. With the kit, the users can build three robots that each represent a level of learning and a stage of complexity by introducing consecutive bio-inspired robots that incorporate newer and more complex mechanical, electronic, and programming systems as opposed to their predecessors. This way, the user’s abilities naturally improve as they interact with the kit, reflecting a sense of evolution. The most straightforward stage is the Lime (a fish robot), the next is Satsuma (a turtle robot), and the third is Lemon (a dog robot). The kit includes inexpensive materials such as Raspberry Pi Zeros, MG90S servo motors, and PCA9685 servo boards to increase accessibility. Lemon has a gamification element that encourages students to design their ideal pets. This feature aims to flourish the creativity of children by encouraging them to use the skills that they acquired through Lemon and adopt these skills to the pet robots that they design and build from scratch. Additionally, the kit has a platform where individuals can find documentation about the equipment, step-by-step instructions on the building process, a custom library, and related built-in features while interacting with the platform and the robot they build, amending its attributes in creative manners urged by the guidance of our platform. Lemon stands out as a kit not only for prototyping but also for STEAM education in general, with various applications within schools and maker spaces.