Thymio
Thymio II is an educational robot in the 100 Euros price range. The robot was developed at the EPFL in collaboration with ECAL, both in Lausanne, Switzerland. A purely-visual programming language was developed at ETH Zurich .[1] All components, both hardware and software, are open source. The main features of the robot are a large number of sensors and actuators, educational interactivity based on light and touch, and a programming environment featuring graphical and text programming. Thymio has over 20 sensors and 40 lights and integrates with third party languages such as MIT's Scratch.
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One of the unique features of these robots is its design, production, and commercialization by a full open-source and non-profit chain of actors. This very alternative approach has been justified by the educational goal of the project. The design has been mainly made by universities (EPFL,[2] écal[3] and ETHZ[4]) within research programs (NCCR Robotics[5]). Mechanics,[6] electronics[7] and software[8] are open source. The company producing Thymio, called Mobsya[9] is a non-profit organization.
Many articles have been written about how to teach with Thymio in the classroom including the article, "Classroom robotics: Motivating independent learning and discovery[10]" on Robohub. Research and new Thymio projects are constantly being done as noted by IEEE.[11] In 2020 Thymio's pedagogical design was evaluated by Education Alliance Finland. In the evaluation, a group of teacher-evaluators in Switzerland assessed Thymio's curriculum alignment, pedagogy, and usability through using a science-based product evaluation method, developed by Education Alliance Finland and Finnish educational researchers.[12] The product evaluation was funded by Stiftung Mercator[13] and as an outcome of the evaluation, Thymio was granted a pedagogical quality certification.[14]
The robot is in production and distributors of Thymio include TechyKids.com.