Wolly was born from a research project of the University of Turin. This robot was created thanks to a co-design sessions carried out in close contact with children of a primary school, between 8 and 9 years old, which gave life to the appearance of Wolly. From these activities, several scientific articles have been published on the development of interfaces and research methods.
The Wolly project was then partially funded by the Google PD Educator Award ($20,000 USD) under the EMEA 2019 Teacher Professional Development Grants (computer science).
The aim of the grant was to train teachers (mainly primary and secondary schools) in teaching educational robotics through the development and promotion of a free online platform, co-designed with them, offering activities to be carried out in the classroom with Wolly, the open-source educational robot developed together with the researchers and PhD students of the Department of Computer Science and the Smart HCI Lab of the IcxT Centre, whose second release was planned in the project.
