botSTEM is an ERASMUS+ project aiming to raise the utilisation of inquiry-based collaborative learning and robots-enhanced education. The project outputs are specifically aimed to provide in- and pre-service teachers in Childhood and Primary Education and children four-eight years old, with research-based materials and practices that use…

Every week, thousands of "makers" worldwide indulge their passion for creating, inventing, and meddling as they visit "Tinkering studios," "Tinkerlabs," and "Tinkergarden." Such "makers" are inherently engineers; exhibiting many of the Engineering Habits of Minds described in this Special Issue as…

Notwithstanding the hype surrounding the enthusiasm and rush that characterises the employment of robotics in formal educational contexts, their use is described as nothing less than fragmented. In the circumstances that processes of adoption and application of digital tools are clearly outpacing their accommodation and enactment in formal…

The design of any robotic system requires input from engineers from a variety of technical fields. This paper describes a project-based module, "Biologically-Inspired Robotics," that is offered to Electronics and Computer Science students at the University of Southampton, U.K. The overall objective of the module is for student groups to…

Motion planning is a core problem in robotics concerned with finding feasible paths for a given robot. Motion planning algorithms perform a search in the high-dimensional continuous space of robot configurations and exemplify many of the core algorithmic concepts of search algorithms and associated data structures. Motion planning algorithms can…

With the evolution of the surrounding world market, engineers have to propose innovations in products and processes. Industrial innovation frequently results from an improved understanding of basic physics. In this paper, an approach to accelerate inventive preliminary design is presented. This method combines the main advantages of CBR (Case…

The George Lucas Educational Foundation began in 1991 with an ambitious mission: to demonstrate how innovative learning environments in classrooms, supported by powerful new technologies, could revolutionize learning. As an organization founded by George Lucas, its members believed that the same benefits of technology that were transforming…