[chbot] Which robot kit?

[Andrew Errington]

Hello chaps,

It's time for me to tap your collective wisdom.  I know I'll get a hundred
different answers, but right now I have nothing.

First, a bit of background.  I am teaching English in a Middle School in
South Korea.  The students are about age 12 to age 15.  The school wants
to make a robot class and has asked me to help.  We will try and use
English in the class, but we'll probably use a lot of Korean.  It doesn't
matter if the programming language uses mostly English words, and in fact
that would be preferable.

Naturally I have no problem hacking on stuff to make it work, but that's
no good for a classroom of beginners, and I can't solder up enough stuff
for a class of 15 or so students.  I'd like some sort of kit, or some
system with a range of plug-in modules and the ability to attach
third-party or homebrew modules.  And obviously not too expensive.  The
programming software must run on a Windows PC, and I'd prefer a text
editor interface to write programs.  I'm thinking Processing might be a
good environment for this, but I've enever used it.

I want something I can use to make simple robots for solving classic robot
problems such as line following, obstacle avoidance and simple navigation
(wheel encoders etc).  Maybe a Logo-based drawing turtle  I am hoping that
the topic of robots will expose the students to lots of English, and I
hope they will be interested enough to want to study English more so that
they can learn more about robots and technology in general.  Yes, there
are robot and technology companies in Korea, but I want them to look
outside Korea too.

I'd particularly like to hear from educators on this list, especially if
you have a system that works (and your advice to avoid things that don't
work, either specific hardware, or teaching traps to avoid).  I am very
aware that adopting something like this puts pressure on the teachers (to
learn how it all works) and the school (to pay for maintenance and replace
broken parts), but we'll start small and see how it goes.

There are some Korean suppliers, and if you guys make suggestions I might
find  the same stuff on sale here.  My first step is to define a couple of
typical robot tasks, buy one kit, and make sure we can all understand it
and get it to work.  After that we can buy a bunch of kits and put
together a course and worksheets and let the students play.

Thanks in advance for any advice and information you can offer.

Best wishes,

Andrew