Robotics Laboratory Within the Italian School-Work Transition Program in High Schools: A Case Study

This paper presents a robotics laboratory originated by the collaboration between the university and high school within the Italian school-work transition program. The educational objective of the proposed lab is twofold: 1) ease the transfer of robotic researchers’ expertise into useful means for the students’ learning; 2) teaching by practice the multidisciplinarity of robotics. We exploited the RoboCup Junior Race as a useful scenario to cover topics from 3D printing for fast prototyping to low-level and high-level controller design. An ad-hoc end-of-term student survey confirms the effectiveness of the approach. Finally, the paper includes some considerations on how general problems in the robotic and scientific community, such as gender issues and COVID-19 restrictions, can impact the educational robotics activities.