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In this paper, an educational robot that can be controlled and programmed over the internet and a simple computer game of marbles are presented. The robot was made from Fischertechnik set and controlled with Arduino Uno, connected over the cloud using mBlock 5. The robot and most of the game were prepared before the workshops with students. Students aged 9–14 added basic control commands for the game and the robot. They filled out qualitative and quantitative questionnaires about the motivation for a live game of marbles, a computer game of marbles, and a robot game of marbles controlled over the internet. The pros and cons of a computer game and a robot design and control were evaluated. Changes in motivation for playing a live game of marbles before and after the computer game and robot game were analyzed. Finally, a comparison of students' motivation for learning programming a computer game and an educational robot was made and advices for keeping the motivation were given.

This Research-to-Practice Full Paper presents a reflective analysis of robotic literacy activities focused on children and teenagers. Robotic literacy is integrated or being integrated into the education system for children at an early age all around the world. Most of the teachers in charge of this education lack skills and are left to fend for themselves. This study proposes to focus on the discourses made by teachers and learners during such activities, and especially the metaphors used spontaneously. It takes shape through two robotic literacy activities. The first activity involved the robots BeeBot, BlueBot and Ozobot in seven classes of children from 3 to 10 years old. The second activity consisted of a five half-days training for 13 participants from 8 to 15 years old. They designed, built and programmed a robot. Young people's representations and interactions with robots involved in educational activities are observed to contribute to the development of questions for critical technology education. Analyses are carried out using the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Jonhson. Three roles are identified: the metaphor that helps to understand, the metaphor that makes tangible, and the metaphor that serves as a catchphrase. A metaphor can take more than one role and, whatever its role, can be classified as a living or non-living metaphor. Using living metaphors may hide aspects of the machine and raises ethical issues, inter alia. It is then essential to deconstruct young people's representations of the machine. This can be achieved by analyzing robots as social constructions that reflect human intentions.

Joystick-based teleoperation is a dominant method for remotely controlling various types of robots, such as excavators, cranes, and space telerobotics. Our ultimate goal is to create effective methods for training and assessing human operators of joystick-controlled robots. Towards that goal, an extensive study consisting of a total of 38 experimental subjects on both simulated as well as a physical robot, using either no feedback or auditory feedback, has been performed. In this paper, we present the complete experimental setup and we report only on the 18 experimental subjects teleoperating the simulated robot. Multiple observables were recorded, including not only joystick and robot angles and timings, but also subjective measures of difficulty, personality and usability data, and automated analysis of facial expressions and blink rate of the subjects. Our initial results indicate that: First, that the subjective difficulty of teleoperation with auditory feedback has smaller variance as compared to teleoperation without feedback. Second, that the subjective difficulty of a task is linearly related with the logarithm of task completion time. Third, we introduce two important indicators of operator performance, namely the Average Velocity of Robot Joints (AVRJ), and the Correct-to-Wrong-Joystick Direction Ratio (CWJR), and we show how these relate to accumulated user experience and with task time. We conclude with a forward-looking discussion including future steps.