Idea Outline
Oblobots is an open source platform to facilitate education on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It offers tools that allows the public to create user-adjustable objects to introduce children to digital fabrication and robotics.

The Challenge
Society has been empowered to create their own consumer technological products in the last decade, through the spread of open hardware electronics and the democratization of digital manufacturing tools. Making society aware of the amount of new possibilities for education that this new landscape offers, starts by allowing children to use and understand these powerful tools. We want to create an open source learning platform to offer means that empower the educational community with knowledge to introduce themselves into digital fabrication, electronics and robotics. By offering this platform to schools we give advantage to innovation and to create scientific awareness through society, that in the long term will certainly have a positive impact on the competitiveness of the European Union.

The Solution

This educational platform will empower all actors in the educational ecosystem in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). It will be focused in a prototype of an educational robot called Oblobot, as a mean to teach concepts of electronics, robotics and personal and digital fabrication for children. Oblobot prototype will be open source and highly customizable in order to cover a huge range of needs. It will be also compatible with other open hardware platforms like arduino. Open source training materials will be available: guidelines to run STEM workshops with Oblobots and digital files for 3D print Oblobots to run the workshops. We will run workshops to test these materials, and it will be susceptible to modification and improvement by the community of users.

Target group and social impact
With our open source platform the educational community will have access to new ways to bring innovation and create scientific vocation among young people. Moreover, this project will have a positive impact on society, as bringing them tools to discover and approach science and technology, it is a way of empowerment. It will facilitate the participation among every agent at the educational ecosystem. They will benefit from a tool designed to engage themselves, as at an open source project, they will be able to modify and improve tools and content. It will be shared and published using the platform allowing the whole community to have access to it. This will improve the offer of teaching materials in electronics, robotics and digital fabrication for our everyday needs in STEM education.




Competences of the applicant
Sara Alvarellos @trecedejunio architect, designer and co-founder of Makespace Madrid. Jorge Medal is an industrial designer, he develops the @oblomobka project, which focus on parametric design and local fabrication in a networked world.