Educational robot Edison speaks Czech

This is how our Edison to Schools activity started. It was named by the chosen robot and today it boasts almost a hundred participating schools and about 250 trained teachers from a large part of Moravia.

At the beginning of pilot teaching, my colleagues asked me to help them with a group of younger students. And I happily agreed. 

In our industry, the knowledge of English language is essential. Programming languages are in English, just like most of the documentation and learning resources. Programming tool for the Edison robot was in English only at that time too. And finally, children learn English from the first grades these days, so we assumed we would guide the teachers to use English in their lessons, and it wouldn’t be a problem for their students. We hoped the students could learn new words in their English lessons and then use them in computer science lessons as well. 

At that time, we were asked to show Edison robots at a public event for children. We knew we wouldn’t have any teachers available, we didn’t know how old the children would be and from which schools they would be. So we suspected there wouldn’t be time and space to translate the programming tool for the children so they would remember everything and try the robot as much as possible. So, the urgent need to translate the programming tool to Czech arose. 

The Edison programming tool is a publicly available website, so in a short time I created a Chrome browser plugin that translated at least the essentials – programming blocks, warnings and error messages. We installed the plugin on a few computers, and we went to the event with them. We realized it had been a good decision. Without the plugin we would struggle with English and children wouldn’t try that much.

As part of our pilot teaching, using English worked well, but during the first workshops for teachers, we realized that this approach wouldn’t work at many of the elementary schools. Children learn English from the very beginning but especially the younger ones have only the basics and the number of new English words would be too much for them. We also realized that many teachers don’t speak English well enough to help children and make the lessons comfortable enough for themselves. 

Therefore, English has become a barrier, and we didn’t want that. For the very first workshops we translated the official learning resources and made them available to teachers. We also had a browser plugin, so I improved it a little and at the end of 2019 we published it. Since that, multiple new plugins have been added to the Chrome store that translate the Edison programming tool to Catalan, French and Japanese and are very likely inspired by our plugin. 

Since the initial publication I have updated the plugin several times, including support of the third version of Edison robot. These days, the plugin has more than seven thousand installs and runs more than a thousand times every week. So, the schools use the plugin and together with our workshops it helps teachers to give children basic knowledge of programming and creating algorithms and to teach them to analyze and solve various problems.

This year the manufacturer of the Edison robot published a new version of their programming tool that supports multiple languages by itself. But Czech language is still missing, even though we actively communicate with the manufacturer, and they are familiar with our activities. So, I also updated the plugin this time ensuring that Czech is available and we continue to convince the manufacturer to support Czech by itself.

We hope we will succeed and that the Czech translation will be a little more accessible, so that teaching programming in elementary schools will be easier and barrier-free for both teachers and children.