• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.95-102
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• 2017

Modular toys for creative education require functional blocks to create various types of movements. An active drive module and a lot of passive connection blocks are needed to express motion with combination. In this paper, we propose the design of modular toys to produce various creative movements and controller structure working with them. In order to facilitate the connection between the designed modules, a connection method and a suitable mechanism are suggested. We also dealt with the design of various types of sensor modules that can work in conjunction with modular toys. Using these toys, typical standard application form that can be imitated educationally is suggested and showed the usefulness of the modular toy by actually applying it with designed modules and components. The proposed method is applied to actual educational toys, and the operation is effectively performed by recording operation and playing repetitive operation.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.59-65
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• 2017

In order to realize the operation of the creative modular toy, it is required to record the motion and to read and repeat the motion. At this time, a control potentiometer is used to read the absolute angle of rotation of the toy motion output shaft. However, the unstable part of the sensing area of the potentiometer is present in a certain region, which may lead to instability of the motor control. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to find the absolute angle of one rotation by reading two stable potentiometers on one axis and reading each stable region. We also describe the correction algorithm that is needed to perform multiple rotations. The proposed method is applied to Topobo modular toys to record the operation and perform iterative operation. In addition, multi-turn operation is recorded and operated to suggest the usefulness of the proposed method. In the future, we will expand the functions of recording and playback through various actions.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.29-35
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• 2016

The conventional educational robots, which are commonly industrial robots or toy robots, use text-based programming to teach the students. Therefore, students have difficulty in studying robotics due to the difficulties of text based language. The developed robot in this study have a camera, which have the color tracking function, and it has various sensors and actuators. It supports the open hardware and uses graphic language based programming. The developed educational robot is programmed by Scratch, which uses graphic modular language. We also present a curriculum, which is based upon the developed robot and Scratch. We applied the robot and curriculum to the primary school students. We obtained satisfactory results comparing it with the conventional robot education. Furthermore, the imagination and execution ability of students showed enhancement in learning robotics. Thus, this fact means the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.