Evaluation of a robotics course with the humanoid robot NAO in CS teacher education

Abstract

Using Educational robotics as an hands-on approach to Computer Science (CS) is very popular in international CS education. The market provides various robotics systems for CS education with regard to e.g. age group of the students. In this article we present an evaluation of a robotics course using the ready-to-use humanoid robot NAO. This humanoid robot is a 58cm tall robot with 25 degrees of freedom, various sensors (cameras, microphones, touch sensors, sonar, etc.) and can be programmed in multiple programming languages. We conducted this course over two semesters with CS teacher candidates and collected their opinion on the humanoid robot NAO with a short questionnaire at the end of the one-week course. All in all, this article provdides an insight on the teaching practice using robotics in CS education at our university and contributes to the discussion about robotics systems for the CS classroom.