Jul 8 2015
Gums tix, Inc. , the premier provider of Linux® computersonmodule (COMs) for electronic manufacturers, educators and hobbyists, today announced its partnership with the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR) and its Botball® Educational Robotics to provide the next generation platform for standardsbased robotics education.
The announcement takes place today at KIPR’s 2015 Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) , with over 600 students and educators attending and competing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
KIPR’s Botball program, targeted and middle and high school aged students interested in robotics, is a teamoriented competition designed to meet today’s common core standards in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. Botball exposes students to inquirybased learning while engaging their science, technology math and writing skills to create completely autonomous robots based around a common development platform.
Designed with Geppetto, Gumstix’ D2O (designtoorder) tool for creating completely custom smart devices, the new KIPR Controller will offer students access to a powerful computing environment running on a small, lightweight and lowpowered computing solution. Geppetto’s customization capabilities, with a lead time of just 20 days, make it easy for users to create a design to meet an exact specification while offering reductions in both price and development time. Savings in both time and cost allow users such as Botball to get their designs up and running faster and more reliably, all with less overhead.
“Gumstix is proud to provide the technology behind the nextgeneration KIPR Controller” said Dr. W. Gordon Kruberg, president and CEO of Gumstix, Inc. “STEM is a field of everincreasing importance for today’s students, and Botball does an excellent job of engaging and training young minds in the critically important field of automated robotics. We look forward to working with Botball and seeing continued success in their program.”
“We are very excited to be working with Gumstix,” said Steve Goodgame, Executive Director of KIPR. “Gumstix shares our vision in educational robotics outreach through the empowerment of educators and the participation of students K12.”
The announcement will be made by Dr. Kruberg at the opening ceremony for the 2015 Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) . At GCER, students, educators, enthusiasts and professionals alike connect with peers from across the world, to discuss technologyrelated ideas and compete in teams during two autonomous robot tournaments.