Open Roberta Lab is a seasoned open-source on-line platform for programming various educational robotics platforms, developed by Roberta Initiative at Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems. It is based on well-known Scratch-like block programming paradigm, but a distinguishing feature is that in addition to programming real robots, it also contains a simulator. The same program that steers a real robot can control a simulated one. Students can learn the principles of Robotics even without access to real Robotics hardware, which has a useful potential in large-scale use, especially in countries with higher population, or lower economic development. In EduRob summer school at TU Graz in July 2024, we started a work on tutorials for Open Roberta Lab, which is also equipped with a powerful tutorial editor for in-app tutorials. Eventually, we have designed 12 tutorials of increasing complexity that introduce many common concepts of programming educational robotics platforms, such as obstacle avoidance, many different ways of line-following, pattern recording and recognition. However, they could also be used to teach programming - as they gradually introduce programming concepts, such as loops, conditions, variables, data structures, events, procedures, and even parallelism and multiple-robot programming. And that is exactly what we did - we localized the original English version of the tutorials to Slovak language, and used them to teach programming in four groups of 8th grade students in a regular upper primary school in Bratislava in the period of November 2024 - June 2025. In this article, we summarize our novel ideas we implemented in the tutorials and share our experiences and feedback from the programming course we served the students.

Keywords: Open roberta lab, programming, robotics, simulation.