Introducing Thymio, an educational robot

Thymio has been developed in the context of a collaboration between the MOBOTS group of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the Lausanne Arts School (ECAL). Mobsya association took part in the development and managed production and distribution.

Thymio is a small, open source robot and a pedagogical tool invented by teachers for teachers. 

It aims to enable young people to discover the fascinating world of robots and technology by programming and playing with its many features. 

Thymio comes out of its box already mounted, you can start it in a few seconds. With 6 preprogrammed behaviors, you can find out what he can do in no time. Follow a line, avoid obstacles or follow your hand, Thymio already knows how to do many things. 

Use the arrows on the robot to navigate between the behaviors. The central button to activate or to deactivate a behaviour.

Thymio's 6 behaviors are distinguished in 6 different colors, those behaviors are:

Friendly = Follows your hand and reacts to another friendly Thymio.

Explorer = Avoids obstacles and stops at the edge of the table or if the ground is black.

Fearful = Goes away if you approach and screams if you corner it or if you throw it in the air.

Attentive = Changes its colors and moves depending on the number of claps it detects.

Investigator = Follows a black track on the ground. Make sure your track is at least 3cm wide.

Obedient = Reacts to the buttons and to the remote control. Press multiple times to accelerate or decelerate.

With the Thymio VPL software, that you can find inside our Thymio Suite, you can program Thymio with image blocks in an intuitive way. By combining events and actions, you will change the behavior of Thymio in a few clicks.

After Thymio VPL, you can program Thymio with other software ( VPL3, Blockly, Scratch, Aseba Studio, Python) to go further. To guide you through these interfaces, there are a lot of pedagogical resources developed for this little robot.

Thymio is user friendly and intuitive and it that can be used from Kindergarden until University. Until today, 72'000 robots that have been already distributed in different schools around the world. 

Feel free to contact us If you would like to have more information: [email protected]