In recent years, an increasing number of school children is beginning to learn about robotics in the classroom in order to stir their interest in STEM professions. Teachers rely on simple educational robots and intuitive programming environments and graphical programming environments have become a frequent starting point for young robotics newbies. However, currently available tools do often not sufficiently support teachers and students in the classroom. In this study, we evaluate programming environments for educational robots; our results point to the need of lowering the complexity of tools as well as of incorporating combinations of web and cloud technologies, embedded systems and communication concepts into these environments. The technical part of this work presents Open Roberta -an open source based addition to commercial educational robot environments that addresses these needs.

The aim of the Open Roberta initiative is to support visual online programming of educational robots. The goal is to overcome technical and professional barriers for teachers and students alike at home or in the classrooms. The free to use cloud-based Open Roberta Lab consists of graphical programming tools for the browser that enable beginners to seamlessly start coding without long-winded system installations, setups or additional technology getting in the way. Open Roberta is a project within the Fraunhofer initiative ”Roberta - Learning with Robots”. A further aspect of the paper is the introduction of the NEPOR meta programming language as a core concept for coupling real educational robot systems.