Contributing to the Development of Linguistic and Logical Abilities through Robotics

In primary schools robot programming is fun and may therefore represent an excellent tool both for introducing to ICT and for helping the development of logical and linguistic abilities of schoolchildren. Core of our project is NQCBaby, a Logo-like robot programming language, which – in the tradition of Logo – is child-oriented rather than robot-oriented like NQC. In the early 90's S. Papert had already suggested the educational use of ”small robots programmed in Logo” [Papert 1993]. We had robots, of course we had Logo, but we had no Logo for robots. NQCBaby is an Italian version of a Logo-like interface to NQC, so that children used to deal with the Turtle can transfer and adapt their implicit abilities to robots, also discussing the differences. In the kind of activities we consider, schoolchildren start by using a very simple language, the first level of NQCBaby, to interact with the simplest robots RCX; later, as their robot-assembly experience grows, they move on to successively richer versions of the language. As a matter of fact, the constructive pedagogical methodology (and consequently our tools) structures the learning of NQCBaby in several steps, starting with NQCBaby01 up to NQCBaby05, as new hardware components are introduced to build new more sophisticated kinds of robots. In the meanwhile children are also introduced to NQC, the “real” robot language, by looking at how their descriptions of robot behaviors are translated into NQC “in order to be understood by robots”. This step-by-step activity of schoolchildren is coordinated with the parallel learning of the basic linguistic abilities in their native language. A software environment, based on a precompiler from NQCBaby to NQC, is currently being developed for supporting the project principles, in a sequence of levels of increasing complexity and abstraction from NQCBaby01 to NQCBaby05. Figure 1. Children assemble a robot, decide behaviour, describe it in NQCBabyh, and look at the resulting specification in NQC; then they enter the next step to learn the next level NQCBabyh+1