Workshop · ICWL–SETE 2026 · Tenerife
Accessible, embodied andsimulation-supportedrobotics learning
Most departments that want to teach robotics are stopped by the same three things: the hardware costs more than a cohort can be given, the toolchain assumes a language the students have not met, and a first mistake is expensive.
Browser simulators, digital twins and block-based environments remove all three. RoboATELIER asks the harder question underneath: which of those substitutions teach robotics, and which only teach the simulator.
30 November 2026, held with ICWL–SETE 2026 and hosted by the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands. Papers appear in Springer LNCS.
30 November 2026
Half-day workshop
Written
A program in blocks
Checked
Run first by the twin
Moved
Then by the arm
At a glance
What is being proposed, and when it is due
Three of these dates are fixed by the conference and cannot move. The other two are this workshop’s own, and are set to leave authors a usable gap between notification and camera-ready.
Key dates
Submission 23:59 AoE
30 September 2026
Paper submission
16 October 2026
Notification to authors
31 October 2026
Camera-ready due
30 November 2026
Workshop day
1–3 December 2026
Main conference
RoboATELIER 2026 will accept papers through EasyChair. The track is being set up with the ICWL–SETE workshop chairs, and the link appears here — and in the call for papers — as soon as it exists.
Scope
Four places the problem lives
The call is grouped rather than listed, because the grouping is the argument: the screen and the bench are two halves of one question, the representation between them is a choice with consequences, and none of it counts until somebody measures it.
- 6 topics
Robots that run in a browser
Everything that puts a robot in front of a learner without putting one in the room.
- 5 topics
Robots you can afford to break
The hardware side of the same problem: what a department can actually buy, run and supervise.
- 5 topics
How a beginner says what a robot should do
The representation between the learner and the joint angle, and what choosing it costs.
- 7 topics
Whether any of it worked
The measurement half. Submissions reporting a negative or null result are explicitly welcome.
Submitting
Three kinds of paper, one review standard
Accepted papers appear in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, published jointly alongside the ICWL–SETE 2026 post-conference proceedings.
Full paper
12–15 pages
Completed work: a system with an evaluation, a study with results, or a framework with evidence behind it.
20-minute talk
Short paper
6–11 pages
Work in progress, an early study, a focused technique, or a well-argued position with data.
12-minute talk
Demonstration paper
up to 4 pages
A tool, kit or simulator shown running. Bring the hardware or the browser tab; the session is built around things that work, including things that only just work.
Bench session
Submission is not open yet
RoboATELIER 2026 will accept papers through EasyChair. The track is being set up with the ICWL–SETE workshop chairs, and the link appears here — and in the call for papers — as soon as it exists.
The case
Why this belongs at a web-based learning conference
Robotics education has usually been filed under engineering, and web-based learning has usually been filed under everything else. The two met when the robot moved into the browser — and once it did, every question this conference already asks about online learning came with it.
A browser simulator is a web-based learning environment that happens to contain a robot. A digital twin is an automatic formative assessment that happens to check joint angles. A remote laboratory is a scheduling and access-equity problem before it is a robotics one. The methods for studying all three already exist here.
What robotics adds is a hard constraint the rest of the field rarely gets: at the end there is a physical arm, and it either does the thing or it does not. That makes it an unusually honest test bed for claims about what online learning transfers.
The overlap with ICWL–SETE 2026
The conference’s own topics already include educational technology, learning analytics, generative AI in education, embodied intelligence in education and inclusive education. Robotics is where those five stop being separate problems.
The 2026 theme is “Advancing Educational Technology in the Age of AI”.
Committee
19 members, 9 countries
Organising seats and the review pool are drawn from more than one region on purpose: a panel that shares a syllabus tends to share its blind spots too.
Workshop Chairs
Mohammed Aquil Mirza
Dean, Liaoning Technical University, China
Program Co-Chairs
Sharyar Wani
Department of Computer Science, IIUM, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Publication Co-Chairs
Cong Wu
Liaoning Technical University, China
Publicity Chair
Mohammed Shah Rukh Mirza
The Installers, India
A worked example
One of these systems, running now
Everything the call describes is easier to argue about with something concrete in front of you. HCR is a free browser simulator built on exactly the pattern the workshop is asking questions about.
HCR, the Hair-Cutting Robot simulator
A five-joint arm programmed by dragging blocks, with a digital twin that replays every move first and refuses the ones that would reach the head. It runs in a browser with no hardware and nothing to install.
- Block-based programming, with no text language to learn first
- A twin that checks each move before the arm makes it
- Free, and offline as a desktop application
Declared interest
HCR is built by members of this organising committee. It is shown here as one instance of the workshop’s topic, and submissions that use it get no advantage in review.