Robot kits from Japan: new frontiers in education

The paper introduces and compares the use of current robotics kits developed by different companies in Japan for education purposes. These kits are targeted to a large audience: from primary school students, to university students and also up to adult continuous education. Unfortunately, most information regarding the technical specifications, the practical usages, and the actual educational activities carried out with these kits are currently available in Japanese only. The main motivation beyond this paper is to give non-Japanese speakers interested in educational robotics an overview of the use of educational kits in Japan. The paper is completed by a short description of a proposal for effectively programming one of the shown robots, an educational humanoid, by means of a pseudo-natural language.