Publications associées à The symbiotic relationship between educational robotics and computer science in formal education

Teacher-Mediated and Student-Led Interaction with a Physics Simulation: Effects on the Learning Experience

Computer simulations are often used as support material for science education, as they can engage students through inquiry-based learning, promote their active interaction in the experimentation phase, and help them visualize abstract concepts. For instanc ...

2024

Co-constructing an Effective, Sustainable and Scalable Primary School Computer Science Curricular Reform

Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy

Over the past few decades, the debates have shifted from whether to how Computer Science (CS) should be introduced into formal education. Given the diverse ways to introduce CS into formal education, and the struggles many countries have faced, considerabl ...

EPFL2023

Supporting Teachers' Orchestration in Robot-mediated Classrooms

Sina Shahmoradi

To bring educational robots to classrooms, we need to consider teachers' self-efficacy and challenges in managing a robot-mediated classroom, and how to support them in overcoming these challenges. Orchestration tools are designed to support teachers by pr ...

EPFL2023

How are primary school computer science curricular reforms contributing to equity? Impact on student learning, perception of the discipline, and gender gaps

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno

Background Early exposure to Computer Science (CS) and Computational Thinking (CT) for all is critical to broaden participation and promote equity in the field. But how does the introduction of CS and CT into primary school curricula impact learning, perce ...

2023

Planned, taught, learnt: analysis of transversal skills through curriculum using portfolio

Helena Kovacs, Alexandra Corina Niculescu, Tamara Milosevic

There is an everlasting effort in education to successfully ensure that the intended learning objectives are clearly taught and effectively learnt at the end of the educational cycle. This has been especially difficult in teaching and learning complex sets ...

TU Dublin2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Participatory design of a social robot and robot-mediated storytelling activity to raise awareness of gender inequality among children

Romain Maure, Barbara Bruno

Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...

IEEE2023

Smell Driven Navigation for Soft Robotic Arms: Artificial Nose and Control

Egidio Falotico, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Elephants and other animals heavily rely on the sense of smell to operate. Soft robots would also benefit from an artificial sense of smell, which could be helpful in typical soft robotic tasks such as search and rescue, pipe inspection, and all the tasks ...

IEEE2023

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Farshad Khadivar

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

Language Learning using Caption Generation within Reciprocal Multi-Party Child-Tutor-Tutee Interaction

Barbara Bruno

Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) is a learning paradigm characteristic of collaborative interaction between learners with alternating tutortutee roles. In recent years, robot-assisted language learning (RALL) has gained traction by its wide application for l ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Exploration-based model learning with self-attention for risk-sensitive robot control

Sudong Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning for robot control offers the advantages of overcoming concerns on data collection and iterative processes for policy improvement in model-free methods. However, both methods use exploration strategy relying on heuristics ...

2023

Sensorless force and displacement estimation in soft actuators

Jamie Paik, Sagar Dattatray Joshi

Sensing forms an integral part of soft matter based robots due to their compliance, dependence on loading conditions, and virtually infinite degrees of freedom. Previous studies have developed several extrinsic sensors and embedded them into soft actuators ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Robotics

Mikhail Koptev

In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...

EPFL2023

Identifying important sensory feedback for learning locomotion skills

Auke Ijspeert, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda

Robot motor skills can be acquired by deep reinforcement learning as neural networks to reflect state-action mapping. The selection of states has been demonstrated to be crucial for successful robot motor learning. However, because of the complexity of neu ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Modelling the sustainability of a primary school digital education curricular reform and professional development program

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Morgane Solène Denise Chevalier, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno, Emilie-Charlotte Monnier

Sustaining changes in teachers’ practices is a challenge that determines the success of curricular reforms, from which Digital Education (DE) is not exempt. As the literature on sustainability is considered “scarce” and “scattered”, long-term studies model ...

2023

Simulated Learners in Educational Technology: A Systematic Literature Review and a Turing-like Test

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober

Simulation is a powerful approach that plays a significant role in science and technology. Computational models that simulate learner interactions and data hold great promise for educational technology as well. Amongst others, simulated learners can be use ...

SPRINGER2023

Enabling four-arm laparoscopic surgery by controlling two robotic assistants via haptic foot interfaces

Mohamed Bouri, Aude Billard, Walid Amanhoud, Jacob Hernandez Sanchez

Robotic surgery is a promising direction to improve surgeons and assistants’ daily life with respect to conventional surgery. In this work, we propose solo laparoscopic surgery in which two robotic arms, controlled via haptic foot interfaces, assist the ta ...

2023

A Research-Practice Partnership to Introduce Computer Science in Secondary School: Lessons from a Pilot Program

Francesco Mondada, Jean-Philippe Pellet, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno, Helena Kovacs

Context: Introducing Computer Science (CS) into formal education can be challenging, notably when considering the numerous stakeholders involved which include the students, teachers, schools, and policy makers. We believe these perspectives should be con ...

2023