Effective Education Using a 2-DOF Five-Bar Mechanism

Innovative methods to teach kindergarten students are on the rise which use virtual environment like a mobile phone or a tablet. However, the students who get great joy in using these gadgets are moving away from actual writing on a paper or slate. In this paper, the authors have proposed a simple mechanism which can be controlled to draw a shape, a numeral, or a letter. It consists of a five-bar mechanism which has 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) and can control the position of the end-effector (EE). The novelty of the proposed mechanism is that it has an iris mechanism at the EE. The student has to hold a pen/pencil and start following the motion of the EE, which draws as per the command from a computer. The pen/pencil has a contact patch and if it touches the inner circle of the iris mechanism, the computer notes it down and the student loses a point. The iris mechanism can be opened and closed to have different difficulty levels for the students, thus making its usage more challenging. A working prototype was tested with few children, and based on their feedback, a newer version is being developed and has also been reported in this paper.