  During the 2017-18 academic year we carried out a series of coding
activities, lasting about 3 months, in a third of the Giulia Falletti primary
school in Barolo in Turin (Gena et a., 2020). These activities aimed to teach
students not only the basics of programming, but also to introduce a new
language and a new way of thinking and solving problems: computational
thinking. The class consisted of 25 pupils: 14 males and 11 females, which we
then operationally divided into two working groups (13 + 12) to make coding
lessons more manageable and provide better childcare. The lessons lasted one
hour and were conducted, in the presence of one of the teachers, by a computer
teacher assisted by a student / facilitator. At the end of the three months of
this positive experience, we realized that having an educational robot that can
perform the same kind of actions that virtual robots do, like those of
code.org, is very useful for children, especially to help them to solve
orientation problems. Therefore, since no commercial robot had the
characteristics we wanted, we decided to create an educational robot from
scratch, equipped with social, interactive and emotional skills, able to
involve children and establish an emotional bond with them in order to increase
their learning and involvement. We decided from the beginning to design the
robot as an open source project, made at a low cost, proposing a kit that can
be easily reproduced and improved by anyone who wishes.
