ColourBot: A New Modular Tool for STEM Education

STEM education is of great importance and although idely adopted in the last decades it still lacks affordable tools with extended capabilities. In this work we introduce an enhanced and significantly modified version of the system proposed by Kakkaras et al. in [1]. The new systems presents a low cost solution, where custom hardware is enclosed into functional shells designed and developed using a 3D printing approach. These shells are connected using a custom connection mechanism with enhanced capabilities, which allow the design and development of various working prototypes. The system is accompanied by a custom software adapted to the age, educational level and skills of the end users, which in our case are students of primary and secondary education. An autonomous mobile robot was developed using the aforementioned approach to highlight the robustness and ease of use of our approach.