Robots in education: New trends and challenges from the Japanese market

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 lifelong learning. We selected company and kits that are most successful in the Japanese market. 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 behind 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 new pseudo-natural language we propose for effectively programming one of the presented robots, the educational humanoid Robovie-X.