ROBO Architetti

A city is not just streets and buildings. It is a living ecosystem made of people, relationships, technologies, and spaces that interact with one another.
With ROBO Architetti, we invited girls and boys to become designers of an imaginary city, creatively and technologically exploring what it means to build and share a common space.

The camp took place at the Istituto Comprensivo Arcadia and involved 4th and 5th grade primary school classes in an intensive week of hands-on workshops.

The City as a Complex Ecosystem

Throughout the program, the city was presented and experienced as a system in which:

• People and places influence one another

• Mobility and services shape the way spaces are inhabited

• Technologies become tools to improve quality of life

Through a hands-on methodology, students worked in teams to design neighborhoods, buildings, and infrastructures, reflecting on needs, relationships, and sustainability.

Building with Hands, Designing with Code

The project combined manual creativity with computational thinking:

• Cardboard constructions to shape the city’s buildings

• Educational robotics with mBot2 to bring the urban space to life

• 3D printing to customize details and components

The robots became the city’s “citizens” or vehicles: they moved along streets, crossed intersections, and responded to stimuli, simulating real dynamics of mobility and interaction.

mBot2: The Technological Core of the Project

For the camp, we used mBot2 robots, designed by Makeblock for learning STEM, robotics, and programming.

mBot2 features:

• CyberPi controller, a microcomputer with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

• Built-in sensors (light, sound, color, 6-axis motion)

• Microphone and color display

• Motors with encoders, distance and line-following sensors

• Modular system expandable with mBuild electronic modules

Programming was carried out through mBlock, a block-based visual environment built on Scratch 3.0, with the option to introduce Python for a gradual transition to text-based coding.

This enabled students to intuitively understand how an automated system works: input, processing, output. Every coding decision translated into a visible behavior within the collaboratively built urban space.

Skills Developed

ROBO Architetti fostered:

• Creativity and spatial design

• Computational thinking

• Problem solving

• Collaboration and teamwork

• Awareness of the relationship between technology and society

In just one week, the classroom transformed into an urban design studio: students discussed, experimented, made mistakes, and tried again. The city took shape piece by piece, line of code by line of code.

Imagining to Understand the Present

Designing an imaginary city became a way to observe the real one with new eyes.
Through cardboard, robots, and 3D printing, students explored what it means to inhabit a shared space, take responsibility, and collaborate to build something that works for everyone.

ROBO Architetti was not just a robotics workshop, but a collective experience of civic imagination and educational innovation.