An interactive maze scenario with physical robots and other smart devices

This paper describes an educational application that combines handhelds (PDAs) and programmable Lego bricks in a classroom scenario that deals with the problem of letting a robot escape from a maze. It is specific to our setting that the problem can be solved both in the physical world by steering a Lego robot and in a simulated software environment on a PDA or on a PC. This approach enables the students to generate successful sets of rules in the simulation and to test these sets of rules later in physical mazes, or to create new types of mazes as challenges for known rule sets. In this paper we describe the technical setting for this scenario, different pedagogical scenarios and we will report an evaluation with a group of students in a school environment.