Open Roberta

Open Roberta is the name of a project within the German education initiative "Roberta—Learning with robots", initiated by Fraunhofer IAIS, which is an institute belonging to the Fraunhofer Society. With Open Roberta Fraunhofer IAIS is looking to encourage kids to code by using robots e.g. Lego Mindstorms, and othe programmable hardware systems e.g. Arduino, BBC micro:bit, Calliope mini. The Cloud-approach of the Open Roberta Lab makes programming easier and minimizes the hurdles for teachers and schools to teach how to code. Open Roberta is free and does not require any installation. The project was initially founded with €1Mio by Google.org

Open Roberta Lab is cloud-based programming environment and is the user-facing middleware in a chain of software and firmware bits that make a robot work in a classroom environment. This environment allows children and young people with no technical pre-knowledge to program a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 and NXT robot, as well as the Arduino based robot Bot'n Roll ONE A, the BBC micro:bit, and the Calliope mini. There is a variety of different program blocks available to program the motors, sensors, and the EV3 brick. Open Roberta Lab uses the approach of visual programming. This approach makes it easier - especially for beginners with no experience - to learn how to code. As a cloud based programming environment no installation is needed, any operation system and computer hardware device may be used. The big advantage of Open Roberta Lab is, that it can be used with any device (PC, tablet, smartphone) and with any operating system (Mac OS, Windows, Linux). Only a web browser is needed. The Lab can be used without registration. No user account is needed. As of the release 2.2.1, the linux-based operating system EV3dev is officially supported for the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robot. Open Roberta Lab is available in the following languages: Catalan, Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The programming platform Open Roberta Lab is open source developed. Both the software as well as the open source development tools are available on a server of Fraunhofer Society. The development team at Fraunhofer works together with teachers and education experts from the Roberta network. Therefore, also universities and students are involved in the development. It should address especially female students - the guiding principle of the Roberta project.