Uno de los principales desafíos relacionados con la enseñanza algorítmica y de programación con estudiantes novatos, es enfocar su proceso en la adquisición de conceptos y el desarrollo de habilidades de resolución de problemas en programación, sin perder tiempo superando curvas de aprendizaje orientadas a la sintaxis de lenguajes específicos. La aplicación aquí explicada se propone como una tecnología instruccional que, aprovechando las ventajas de la Programación Visual Blocks, a través de escenarios de robótica móvil virtual y remota, busca dar mecanismos lúdicos y amigables para la programación y el autoaprendizaje algorítmico. Este artículo presenta el diseño y enfoque pedagógico de la herramienta, evaluado a través de un enfoque de Experiencia de Usuario con estudiantes de secundaria en el contexto educativo colombiano.

One of the major challenges related to teaching programming and algorithms to novice students is the time spent on the language's syntax and how their attention is incorrectly focused on the syntax rather than the acquisition of concepts and the development of problem-solving and programming skills. This study focuses on the design and evaluation of a Web App (RoBlock) designed for autodidactic learning. It uses Visual Blocks Programming, and contains six interactive modules that cover programming concepts. The solution is presented as virtual scenarios for Mobile Robotics.

The execution of actions in interactive applications depends on the user's intention. This intention should be able to be expressed in a natural language for the user. The gestures can be exploited as an intuitive language for the user. Using a gesture-based language, an interactive application must be able to express its possible actions independently of the devices that are part of the infrastructure available for the system. In this way, a specialized component in interaction, and decoupled from the application, is responsible for getting the flow of information provided by the interactive devices, to interpret it as gestures with meaning for the user, and to transform the gestures into data inputs defining actions for the application. This paper presents a platform that supports the integration of gesture-based interaction and interactive computer-applications. The use of this platform is illustrated with a case study.

This work presents an approach to plan motion strategies for robotics tasks constrained by uncertainty in position, orientation, and control. Our approach operates in a (x, y, /spl theta/) configuration space and it combines two local functions: a contact-based attraction function and an exploration function. Compliant motions are used to reduce the position/orientation uncertainty. An explicit geometric model for the uncertainty is defined to evaluate the reachability of the obstacle surfaces when the robot translates in free space.

This paper presents an approach to plan robust motion strategies of a robot navigating through an environment composed of polygonal obstacles subject to geometric uncertainty constraints. The contacts of the robot against the obstacles are used to reduce its position and orientation uncertainties and to guide the robot to its goal configuration. The authors describe a motion planner based on this approach which generates both, free space motions and compliant motions (contact based motions). An explicit geometric model for the uncertainty is used to estimate the reachability of the goal and the intermediate subgoals (these are generated when the final goal is not reachable from the current robot configuration). Two functions are combined to explore the valid space : (1) a contact-based potential field function is used to generate continuous motions pulling the robot towards target attractors; (2) an exploration function is used to determine possible subgoals allowing progress towards the ultimate goal when local minima of the previous function occur.>