1) The tutorial area: The students are
encouraged to start their educational journey with
cMinds from the tutorial activity. The tutorial aims at
explaining basic programming concepts such as serial
commands, conditional statements, while loops, and
switches/cases. A simple scenario was selected that
introduces a story for attracting learner interest while
at the same time it maintains a simple environment
and presents just enough information for enabling
learners to solve the problem at hand. This allows
learners to focus on the solution and build confidence
2) The ‘Math activity’: This activity aims at
familiarising students with serial commands while
helping them execute basic mathematical operations.
The activity helps learners develop a general
methodology for addressing operations by bringing
together several mathematical concepts including
estimation, approximation, subtraction, and division.
Graphically, a number line graduated to a scale
provides students with a spatial representation of
mathematical concepts allowing them to visualize the
starting conditions and objectives of mathematical
exercises. Learners are asked to instruct the robot to
move from the starting to the target position on the
line with as few steps as possible from pre-defined
increments [28].