Robots make computer science personal

The Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) is developing a personal robot, software, and curricula to help in teaching introductory Computer Science (CS) courses, which in turn will make Computer Science more personal. The curricula are centered around a small personal robot tentatively named 'Gyro', which is being developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology. CS is fundamentally about problem solving and the example problems assigned to students in the classroom can profoundly influence how they perceive CS relevance and usefulness. A robot, provides intrinsic motivation to both the instructor and the student to explore the science and engineering behind it. IPRE, guided by the philosophical principle of pedagogical salability, looks for tools which are simple to understand and use immediately, yet provide strong pedagogical scaffolding as the student matures. One such tool is the language Python, which is intuitive, powerful and easy to learn.