Scope and topics
What the workshop is asking about
Robotics education has plenty of enthusiasm and not much comparative evidence. The call is written to attract the second kind of paper without excluding the first.
- On the screen
Browser simulators, digital twins, remote and virtual laboratories.
- On the bench
Low-cost kits, sensors, safety, and shared access to scarce hardware.
- In between
Blocks, visual pipelines, and language models as the way intent is expressed.
- On the record
Assessment, analytics, curriculum, inclusion, and studies that report what happened.
Motivation
Why now
Robotics is taught less often than it is wanted. A department that would like its students to program a robot arm is usually stopped by three things at once: the hardware costs more than a cohort can be given, the toolchain assumes a text language the students have not met, and a mistake in a first program is expensive in a way a mistake in a first web page is not.
Web-based learning has quietly dismantled all three. Browser simulators put a robot on every laptop. Digital twins let a wrong program fail somewhere safe. Block-based environments and, more recently, language models let a learner express intent before they can express syntax. What is missing is not the technology but the evidence: which of these substitutions actually teach robotics, and which merely teach the simulator.
RoboATELIER 2026 gathers the people building these systems and the people measuring them. An atelier is a workshop in the older sense — where a craft is learned by making, under supervision, on real work. This one is about what has to be true for a robotics atelier to fit inside a normal institution.
On the word
The word is doing work in the title, not decoration. An atelier admits that some things are only learned on work that is real enough to be wrong — which is awkward for a field currently replacing the work with a simulation of it.
So the workshop is not against the simulator. It is for finding out how much of the room can be made affordable, safe and reachable before the thing that made it worth entering has gone.
Topics of interest
23 topics, in four groups
Groups are guidance for authors, not tracks in the programme: a paper that sits across two of them is a paper this workshop wants.
On the screen
Robots that run in a browser
Everything that puts a robot in front of a learner without putting one in the room.
- Browser-based robot simulators and web-delivered robotics laboratories
- Digital twins that validate a learner’s program before hardware executes it
- Remote laboratories and scheduled shared access to scarce hardware
- Sim-to-real transfer treated as a teaching event rather than an engineering one
- WebGL, WebXR and physics engines in the browser as a teaching substrate
- Offline-capable and low-bandwidth delivery for under-connected institutions
On the bench
Robots you can afford to break
The hardware side of the same problem: what a department can actually buy, run and supervise.
- Low-cost and open-hardware robot kits designed for cohorts, not demonstrations
- Modular assembly, calibration and sensor integration as taught activities
- Safety, risk assessment and institutional approval for classroom robots
- Maintenance, technician load and the real total cost of a teaching fleet
- Physical computing, tangible interfaces and making as robotics pedagogy
In between
How a beginner says what a robot should do
The representation between the learner and the joint angle, and what choosing it costs.
- Block-based, visual and dataflow programming environments for robots
- Large language models as tutors, explainers and debuggers for robot code
- Natural-language and multimodal specification of robot behaviour
- Transitions from blocks to text: when to make them and what is lost
- Generative AI for task, scenario and assessment-item generation
On the record
Whether any of it worked
The measurement half. Submissions reporting a negative or null result are explicitly welcome.
- Automated and rubric-based assessment of learner-authored robot behaviour
- Learning analytics from simulator traces, telemetry and version history
- Competency frameworks, curricula and progression in educational robotics
- Accessibility and inclusion: disabled learners, and under-resourced institutions
- Teacher preparation, professional development and institutional adoption
- Replications, negative results and studies that report what did not transfer
- Open datasets, benchmarks and shared teaching resources
The list is indicative. A submission on something adjacent that the organisers did not think of is welcome; say in the abstract why it belongs here.
Guidance
What makes a submission strong here
Reviewers are briefed on these four points, so they are worth knowing before writing.
Say what was measured
A system paper that reports what learners did with the system beats a system paper that reports what the system does. Even a small cohort with an honest limitations section is evidence.
Name the substitution
If the work replaces hardware with simulation, blocks with language, or a technician with a script, say which learning outcome the substitution is meant to preserve — and whether it did.
Report the negative result
Studies where the intervention did not help, or helped less than the control, are explicitly in scope. This field has a publication gap exactly there.
Make it reachable
Kits, code, task sets and datasets that other institutions can actually obtain are weighted favourably. A result nobody can reproduce on a normal budget teaches nobody.
Neighbours
If this is not quite your paper
Five workshops run on 30 November. Two of them overlap with this one, and sending a paper to the right room is better for everybody than sending it to this one.
Where the line falls
- SHINE 2026 takes social robots as companions, carers and inclusion partners — the robot as the one providing support. RoboATELIER takes the robot as the thing being learned.
- GAIE 2026 takes generative AI in education broadly. A paper on an LLM tutor belongs there unless the robot, the kit or the simulator is doing real work in the argument.
The other workshops on 30 November
- QCLA 20261st Qualification-Centric Learning Ecosystems and AI-Supported Learning Pathways
- GAIE 20263rd International Workshop on Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education
- SHINE 20261st Social Robotics and AI for Human-Centred Inclusion, Learning and Wellbeing
- 1st Emerging technologies in education Universities and AI
- 2nd AI and IoT-Enabled Technologies for Medical Education, Assessment, and Personalized Learning in Digital Age