ANNA Robot

Robot that boosts children's learning of electronics and programming, making them adept at developing useful and creative ideas .

The solution is based on a robot that focuses on teaching children electronics and programming logic, having as main characteristic the fact that it can be controlled according to the user's imagination and, also, the development done by reinforcing the importance of a reduced cost, so that children from public schools and living in vulnerable communities can benefit from it.

The ANNA Robot will work as follows: through a guide (digital or printed) the child will receive the necessary instructions to use the toy; through challenges of different complexity, the child will learn the basics of programming and electronics. In addition to developing social-emotional skills such as problem solving and creativity.

For example, in the programming module he will find simple challenges that aim to help the robot reach the end of a route; 

Through an application for mobile devices, she will have to fit the logical blocks together in the correct order to complete the objective.

When the chosen logic is ready, a "start" button is pressed, and then they are transmitted to the bluetooth receiver module, present in the robot and connected to an Arduino Mega (controller), executing the desired action. 

As time goes by, the technological advance and the importance for society of developing skills such as programming from an early age are well known. 

 However, in Brazil, only a minority of children have access to technological resources in their schools. Today 70% of school-age children are in public schools, and the government's investment per student in one year corresponds to US$ 605.31, which does not include access to the Internet or electronic devices.

 The ANNA robot aims to be more accessible than other competing products and to have a unit sales price of US$30.00, which can be reduced according to production studies.  Compared to current competitors that start at US$52.00, with no possibility of scale. These data show that Robot ANNA will be an affordable solution for parents, teachers and public educational institutions, democratizing education for low-income children.

Educators say that proposals such as ANNA (a programmable robot) encourage intellectual development and creativity, necessary especially for children between the ages of 6 and 10, making them capable of dealing with situations that require understanding, strategy, and focus.  It is a toy designed to be playful, interactive, and stimulating, able to help work on persistence and resilience. 

This way, children can learn to organize their thoughts and put them into practice, training to be protagonists of the technological future that awaits them. Considering that in Brazil, the citizens do not receive the necessary instructions to deal with technological growth, causing a great economic delay to the country and hindering the progress of individuals.

Since the project was developed during the epidemic caused by Covid-19, it was not possible to take the project to the children's audience through educational institutions, as we wanted. However, we sought to talk to specialists to understand the needs of our users. In research with 5 professionals in the area (teachers, psychologists and pedagogues) it was possible to notice the importance of projects that seek to stimulate children to be creative and organized, objective and clear in their thoughts and interpretations. Thus, we developed the ANNA robot thinking about these factors, and also, we did a quick test of the prototype with a child (Natiele Vitória Rodrigues, 8 years old) who gave the feedback that our idea is a toy in which she could have fun, learn and use her creativity.

We chose the prototype stage because we already have a defined idea: a robot with the intention of teaching electronics and programming logic and a target audience, children from 6 to 10 years old (according to experts, the most appropriate phase for the learning we want to bring). Currently, we are planning the best ways for the physical construction of our idea and, in the future, we intend to start with the tests.

The proposal employs Bluetooth, Arduino and its IDE, and also uses bidirectional control of DC motors and other electronic devices. Moreover, the application was developed in the Kodular block programming platform.

The prototype consists of a Bluetooth module responsible for the communication between the application and the robot, connected to a microcontroller board (Arduino Mega) that contains components such as a motor, LED, buzzer, H-bridge, and ultrasonic sensor. 

At the moment we have not attended any people yet. However, for next year, we want to start testing in our city (Santa Rita do Sapucaí), which has approximately 3000 children between the ages of 6 and 10, according to the 2010 CENSO. Our goal is to try to reach most of the local educational institutions.

For next year we want to finish building our prototype so we can partner with educational institutions to start testing the idea with our target audience. In this way, we will have feedback on the use of the project, showing us which points we should improve.

We intend to measure our progress according to the proportion of 6 to 10 year old children reached with our project, initially in Santa Rita do Sapucaí.

Our biggest barriers are, mainly:

1 - Lack of financial condition: as we still don't have partner companies and institutions that want to invest in our idea, it is difficult to acquire resources to develop the prototype;

2 - Also, we lack sufficient education to know how to proceed in a professional construction of the idea. For example, we don't know how to develop a more robust hardware or have knowledge about the bureaucracies that involve the registration of a patent;

We are a group of four girls: Elaine, Graziele, Laura and Paula. The first one graduated as an industrial automation technician and the other three as telecommunications technicians. During the course, we realized how much electronics has benefited our lives. With it, we developed both hard and soft skills: we got to know countless resources capable of helping us build ideas, but the most important thing, and what we want the ANNA robot to strengthen, is the organization skills we acquired when we were faced with situations we didn't know how to solve. We now have the ability to understand the problem, break it down into parts, research resources, and define a viable solution. Clear and objective thinking is essential in all areas of our lives. We miss an idea like this in our lives when we look back and see that when we were younger we did not have access to the content we want to bring. And today, seeing examples of children who were taught from an early age to think logically and use technological resources, we notice that we would be much more prepared to face personal challenges of everyday life, school, and the job market. Moreover, the knowledge acquired by us during the technical course today helps us in the construction of this project.

We currently partner with Go Girls, which awarded us with acceleration mentoring after we participated in a contest they offered.

As time goes by, the technological advance and the importance for society of developing skills such as programming from an early age are well known. However, we realize that in our region there are no ideas capable of helping and preparing people for activities that require technology. Therefore, we idealized the ANNA robot, which aims to be more accessible than other competing products and to have a unit sales price of $30.00, which can be reduced according to production studies. Compared to current competitors that start at US$52.00, with no possibility of scale. These data show that the ANNA robot will be an affordable solution for parents, teachers, and public educational institutions, democratizing education for low-income children.

The prize will be useful for the project to gain recognition and for us to have resources that will help us implement improvements on it and, possibly, perform tests. The money will help us to buy quality components for the hardware, build a more robust physical structure and more secure software. We will also be able to invest in marketing and visual identity, as well as gain the necessary knowledge through courses.