Introducing Common Factors For Standardizing The Market For Educational Robots

Education in schools is evolving because of new advances in technology. Topics like 3d printers or robotics are already new disciplines introduced into universities. And now is the time to progress in schools to create the next generation of future engineers. Nevertheless, although there are different kinds of educational robotic kits, it is difficult to find what features are useful for the best exploitation of those resources. Spain is living a revolution in its schools with a new system proposed to teach the children in these disciplines. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the most used educational robotic products in Spain, selecting key factors and proposing a standardization of the current market. Since there are a lot of robotic kits that could be evaluated, we focus our work on those most used in schools or those most evaluated in other previous works. We select these kinds of platforms in order to get the key factors that could give us a standard. Furthermore, after getting these common factors, we have compared the selected products to see which is the most complete nowadays. Our contribution in this field aims at helping teachers and governments to understand how complex is the task of selecting the most appropriate educational robot. In addition, we aim to help companies in the hard task of creating new educational kits to teach the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines.