Liquid-handling Lego robots and experiments for STEM education and research.
Liquid-handling robots have many applications for biotechnology and the life sciences, with increasing impact on everyday life. While playful robotics such as Lego Mindstorms significantly support education initiatives in mechatronics and programming, equivalent connections to the life sciences do not currently exist. To close this gap, we developed Lego-based pipetting robots that reliably handle liquid volumes from 1 ml down to the sub-μl range and that operate on standard laboratory plasticware, such as cuvettes and multiwell plates. These robots can support a range of science and chemistry experiments for education and even research. Using standard, low-cost household consumables, programming pipetting routines, and modifying robot designs, we enabled a rich activity space. We successfully tested these activities in afterschool settings with elementary, middle, and high school students. The simplest robot can be directly built from the widely used Lego Education EV3 core set alone, and this publication includes building and experiment instructions to set the stage for dissemination and further development in education and research.
Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
Lukas C
LC
Gerber
Isaac Newton Graham Middle School, Mountain View, California, United States of America.
Agnes
A
Calasanz-Kaiser
MYP Dresden International School, Dresden, Germany.
Luke
L
Hyman
University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America.
Kateryna
K
Voitiuk
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America.
Uday
U
Patil
Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.
Ingmar H
0000-0002-6068-5561
IH
Riedel-Kruse
D057205:Automation, Laboratory; D001709:Biotechnology; D012371:Robotics / Q000193:education*; D012574:Schools; D012586:Science / Q000193:education; D012984:Software