The GoGo board is a low-cost open-source hardware device for educational robotics, scientific experiments, and environmental sensing. Children can use the board to construct robots, measure and log environmental data, conduct scientific investigations, create game controllers, build interactive art installations, and much more.
BACKGROUND
The GoGo board was designed based on years of extensive field work in developing countries, which concluded that the technological solutions that were available for schools were either not appropriate or too expensive—a single robotics kit would cost the equivalent of a teachers’ monthly salary.
The tenets of our design framework, thus, are:
- The hardware is inexpensive,
- The components are locally available,
- Local assembly is possible with simple equipment,
- There are multiple modes of acquisition (for a single student or a school system) and, last but not least,
- It is open-source.
GOAL
The ultimate goal of the project is to allow for much more widespread adoption in schools worldwide, namely:
- keep developing stable and robust versions of the board,
- generate more educational materials to help teachers and students,
- develop easy-to-use educational kits (for science, robotics, and data-logging)
- explore new directions in physical computing and programming.
RESULTS
The GoGo board has been used for more than 10 years in workshops across the world, including Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Portugal, China, and the United States. There current thousands of boards in schools worldwide.
PRINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS
GoGo Board: Augmenting Programmable Bricks for Economically Challenged Audiences, In Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2004), Los Angeles, USA, 2004.
The GoGo Board: Moving towards highly available computational tools in learning environments, In Procedings of the Interactive Computer Aided Learning International Workshop, Carinthia Technology Institute, Villach, Austria, 2002.
Sipitakiat, A., Blikstein, P. & Cavallo, D. (2003). GoGo board: low-cost, programmable and reconfigurable robotics. In Sampaio, F., Motta C., Santoro, F. (Eds.), XIV Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação – Mini-Cursos. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Ed. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.