Robotito: programming robots from preschool to undergraduate school level Computational thinking is a skill that is considered essential for the future generations. Because of this it should be incorporated into the curricula as soon as possible. Many robots can be programmed using graphical languages or physical blocks instead of writing code. This makes programming more accessible for the youngest programmers. Looking to extend the programming activities to preschool students, we present a novel approach that allows to program a mobile robot, Robotito, by changing its environment. We describe the architecture of Robotito, software used to program its interaction with the environment, and developed behaviours. Moreover, Robotito exports his sensors and actuators using ROS standard mechanisms and is modelled in Gazebo allowing it to be used in research and undergraduate school courses providing researchers an autonomous and safety mobile platform, which can be integrated with any system using ROS.

Designing childrobot interaction with Robotito * Computational thinking is a skill that is considered essential for the future generations. Because of this it should be incorporated into the curricula as soon as possible. An interesting option to work on computational thinking with children is by means of robots. Here, we present Robotito, a robot that can be programmed by arranging its environment, intended to help the development of computational thinking in preschool children. We describe its hardware and software environment, and hierarchical state machines used to implement two modes of interaction with environmentfirst based on color detection and the second sensible to the surrounding objects. We also present activities that we developed to work on abstraction, generalization, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debuggingskills related to computational thinking.