Pre-robot: An open-source educational robotics platform for preschoolers

Educational robotics represent a novel and attractive scenario for stimulating different abilities frequently related to science, technology, engineering, and math. To this extent, there exist multiple approaches depending on the specific ability being tackled, and resources needed such as physical equipment or computational tools. Commercial platforms, as well as open-source educational kits, have made extensive contributions in diminishing coding abilities required for specifying desired behavior on the physical agent, such as programming through block sequences or embedding a smartphone or tablet for more intuitive uses. This work describes prototyping specifications for a novel open-source robot aimed to foster computational thinking abilities on preschool children, including a first approach involved on the built platform, with an embedded processing unit for not requiring any further equipment, and work on development for minimizing costs.