Liquid-handling Lego robots and experiments for STEM education and research
Lukas C. Gerber, Agnes Calasanz-Kaiser, Luke Hyman, Kateryna Voitiuk, Uday Patil, Ingmar Hans Riedel-Kruse · PLoS Biology · 2017
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 subμl 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.Robotics and automation significantly advance the life sciences, e.g., via academic, industrial, and pharmaceutical liquid-handling robots [1,2] and open source approaches [3].Consequently, formal and informal education must convey these concepts.The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other national initiatives promote cross-disciplinary approaches for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning [4,5].Many engaging and successful educational approaches to robotics exist, such as Lego Mindstorms or the FIRST Robotics Competition [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Naturally, these activities foremost focus on mechanical engineering, computer programming, and soft skills like teamwork.To a lesser extent, they are used to support experiments in Natural Science and Math education [12].Crucially, integration of equivalent robotics approaches with the life sciences and chemistry for K-12 and college education are lacking, hence we expect significant value in bridging this gap.