Abstract
This paper presents the development of Bubbles, a didactic robotic fish created within the scope of the European Project Semester offered by the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto. The robotic toy is intended to provide children with an appropriate set up to learn programming and become acquainted with technology. Consequently, Bubbles needs to appeal to young children and successfully blend fun with learning. The developer team, composed of five engineering students from different fields and nationalities, conducted multiple research and discussions to design Bubbles, while keeping the fish movements and programming simple. The fish body was created with a colourful appearance, ensuring floatability, waterproofness and including a tail, inspired on real life fish, for locomotion and to retain a fish-like appearance. Finally, the team designed a website where they share, in different languages, the blue-prints of the structure, the schematics of the control system, the list of material, including electronic components, the user assembly and operation manual as well as propose exploring activities.
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Acknowledgment
EPS@ISEP students enrolled in this project would like to thank Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto for this opportunity to do this program and project. We would also like to thank our client (IT sector – Sistemas de Informação, SA) and all supervisors and teachers that have supported us throughout the project.
This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project «POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961», and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013.
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Reinhardt, A. et al. (2017). Didactic Robotic Fish – An EPS@ISEP 2016 Project. In: Auer, M., Guralnick, D., Uhomoibhi, J. (eds) Interactive Collaborative Learning. ICL 2016. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 544. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50337-0_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50337-0_21
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