Dorothy

Abstract

This paper describes DOROTHY, a novel educational tool that enhances the Alice 3D programming environment to enable bidirectional communication of sensor data and commands with robots capable of autonomous operation. Users without any programming experience can quickly create graphical routines consisting of one or more simulated robots in virtual worlds. Command dictionaries and socket streams enable real-time translation of these routines to software for synchronous or asynchronous control of sensing and actuation on one or more mobile robots with on-board sensing, resulting in adaptive behavior in the real-world. Multiple execution scenarios are described to illustrate the capabilities of the educational tool. Furthermore, the paper outlines a curriculum that can be used with the tool to teach core concepts of computing, concurrent execution and real-world sensing to middle school and high school students, thus stimulating interest in computing.