Robotics kits for schools are boxes of motors, sensors, wheels, wires and a programmable controller board, sold with lesson plans, from which children build robots in the school lab and then write programs that control them. A sensor is a part that measures something, such as light or distance. The controller board is a small computer that reads the sensors and switches the motors on and off, according to the child's program.
Why do schools buy them? India's National Education Policy of 2020 asks schools to teach coding and practical science from the middle classes. Many schools also have an Atal Tinkering Lab, a workshop for students that the government's Atal Innovation Mission helps to fund. A kit gives a teacher a ready way to fill these lab periods. The children learn by building something that moves, which many find easier than learning from a textbook.
Say a Class 7 group at a school in Mysuru builds a line-following robot over six lab periods. The kit has a base with two wheels, two small motors, two infrared sensors and the board. Each infrared sensor shines light at the floor and measures how much comes back. A black line reflects less light than a white floor. In the first two periods, the children assemble the robot and connect the sensors and motors to the board, following the lesson plan.
In the next periods, they write the program on a laptop. They use block coding, in which a program is built by snapping blocks together on the screen. The rule is: if the left sensor sees the black line, slow down the left motor, so the robot turns left; if the right sensor sees it, slow down the right motor. They upload the program to the board through a cable. The program stored on the board is a form of firmware, the software that runs on a device's own chip. The robot drives off the line at the first sharp bend. So the children change the speed and test again until it follows the whole track. Older students later write the same program in Python, a text-based programming language.
The kit company sells the parts, the lesson plans for each class and training for the teachers. Some companies also connect the lessons to the school's digital courseware, so that a science chapter on light leads to a lab period with the light sensor. Many kits can be reused for several years, so the school buys replacement parts rather than new kits.
Children who enjoy the lab often continue at home. Online classes for kids teach coding over video, and some of them use similar kits. At the other end of education, colleges and training centres teach factory automation on a learning factory, a small working production line built for students. The same ideas of sensors, motors and a program that connects them appear there at an industrial scale.