The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed to meet the needs of teaching robotics at scale to match the growth of robotics as a field and an academic discipline. Transformative advancements in robot navigation over the past decades have led to a significant demand for skilled roboticists across industry and academia. This demand has sparked a need for robotics courses in higher education, spanning all levels of undergraduate and graduate experiences. Incorporating real robot platforms into such courses and curricula is effective for conveying the unique challenges of programming embodied agents in real-world environments and sparking student interest. However, teaching with real robots remains challenging due to the cost of hardware and the development effort involved in adapting existing hardware for a new course. In this paper, we describe the design and evolution of the MBot platform, and the underlying principals of scalability and flexibility which are keys to its success.

We present a kit comprising cardboard mechanical components and a custom printed circuit board, designed to support novices in building computational percussive instruments with everyday materials. We set three design criteria: accessibility, adaptability, and expressivity. We conducted two workshops with experts and novices to assess the usability of our kit and observe the variety of constructions that users make. The kit enabled both experts and novices to build working instruments and to explore creative experimentation with different materials and objects.