Development of Micro:Bit Robot Kit as a Tool in STEM Education Enrichment for Primary School Students

Abstract

The integration of robots in education has risen in popularity in the past few years. Their most significant issue is the most commonly used microcontroller that is hard for primary school students to understand and costly, making it almost unfeasible for schools to have one robot for every pupil and lack of research on micro:bit as a microcontroller for robot kit. An additional drawback of commercial systems is their proprietary character, this inhibits the robot's ability to evolve or adapt to educational demands. This research presented a new low-cost micro:bit educational robot kit and open-source software-based platform that may fulfill the needs of STEM enrichment for primary school students. The detail about the micro:bit robot kit components, design, software, and its list of hardware, which enable it to handle a wide range of instructional activities, as well as its simple and easy software stack were described. The research integrates the robot kit and 3 exercises in the micro:bit; the light sensor, temperature sensor, and magnetometer sensor. This research helped primary school students to learn about programming and hardware more easily by using block code as a medium to write the code. Results from the three exercises show high accuracy of output in which the data collected 100% tally with the experiment done. The robot has successfully utilized the open-source software and ease of understanding. Students can build the system by themselves successfully and assist researchers and educators.