Praxis-based Learning: Joy-iT’s Calliope Joy-Car Now Part of Conrad’s Education Range

Making learning fun: Joy-Car is a modular learning kit that comes with a variety of sensors, serves as an easy introduction to robotics, electronics and programming and is expandable when your skills grow. 

©Simac Electronics GmbH

Hirschau, November 2025. Robotics, electronics and programming are at the heart of nowadays educational concepts that apply to primary schools and universities alike. Ideally, learning should be praxis-based, exciting and interactive – basically just like the Calliope Joy-Car by Joy-iT now supplied by the Conrad Sourcing Platform. Conrad and Joy-iT are companies that stand for quality, innovative thinking and reliability – a great foundation for a strong partnership. “We’ve been working with Conrad for the past 16 years,” says Volker Bode, Sales Director at Joy-iT. “As our distributor, they’ve been reliable and trustworthy. We greatly value their excellent reach, their profound knowledge when it comes to technical education and their wide-ranging contacts in Germany’s state education sector.”

Excitingly interactive simulations of autonomous driving

Joy-Car is an educational robot centred around the Calliope mini SBC. It features a horn, indicator lights, headlights, reversing and brake lights as well as line tracking, ultrasound, infrared and wheel speed sensors. Depending on your programming skills, these modules can be operated by a variety of both entry and advanced programming languages, simulating the behaviour of an autonomously driven vehicle. Which is precisely what you need to make technical education exciting and interactive. 

Programming at primary school level

Joy-Car fully integrates with the Open Roberta project initiated by Fraunhofer Institut. This makes it perfect for classrooms: Open Roberta was specifically designed for STEM lessons and uses the open-source visual programming language NEPO. Means children from the age of 9 can use Open Roberta to familiarise themselves in a playful manner with robotics, electronics and programming. No prior knowledge required as there are plenty of tutorials and pre-written units of code available. Moreover, the Calliope mini, a SBC already widely used by teachers and students in classrooms across Germany, serves as an external controller. 

Expansion modules for more advanced users

Besides visual programming, Joy-iT’s Calliope Joy-Car also supports textual programming environments and is, therefore, suited to a wide range of skill levels. More advanced users, such as apprentices and undergraduates, can use MicroPhyton which increases the control options. Using an additional Calliope SBC allows you to automate the operation of reversing and indicator lights as well as headlights and horn, and to activate the controller via Bluetooth. What’s more, addressable LED strips enable setting up and displaying individual lighting patterns.