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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]
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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 Sturiel.com and TechyKids.com.