Thymio II is an educational robot in the 100 Euros price range. The robot was developed at the EPFL in collaboration with ECAL, both in Lausanne, Switzerland. A purely-visual programming language was developed at ETH Zurich .[1] All components, both hardware and software, are open source. The main features of the robot are a large number of sensors and actuators, educational interactivity based on light and touch, and a programming environment featuring graphical and text programming. Thymio has over 20 sensors and 40 lights and integrates with third party languages such as MIT's Scratch.
One of the unique features of these robots is its design, production, and commercialization by a full open-source and non-profit chain of actors. This very alternative approach has been justified by the educational goal of the project. The design has been mainly made by universities (EPFL,[2] écal[3] and ETHZ[4]) within research programs (NCCR Robotics[5]). Mechanics,[6] electronics[7] and software[8] are open source. The company producing Thymio, called Mobsya[9] is a non-profit organization.
Many articles have been written about how to teach with Thymio in the classroom including the article, "Classroom robotics: Motivating independent learning and discovery[10]" on Robohub. Research and new Thymio projects are constantly being done as noted by IEEE.[11] In 2020 Thymio's pedagogical design was evaluated by Education Alliance Finland. In the evaluation, a group of teacher-evaluators in Switzerland assessed Thymio's curriculum alignment, pedagogy, and usability through using a science-based product evaluation method, developed by Education Alliance Finland and Finnish educational researchers.[12] The product evaluation was funded by Stiftung Mercator[13] and as an outcome of the evaluation, Thymio was granted a pedagogical quality certification.[14]
The robot is in production and distributors of Thymio include TechyKids.com.