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The Trikebot is the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost educational robot for secondary level education and home use. This paper describes all aspects of the Trikebot, including chassis and mechanism; control electronics; communication architecture; robot control server and student programming environment. Notable innovations include a fast-build construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java programming interface. In Summer 2002, the authors and others developed, taught and evaluated Robotic Autonomy, a seven-week introductory hands-on robotics course as part of Carnegie Mellon West’s NASA-Ames campus in Mountain View, California [1]. The research surrounding this effort included robot design, curriculum design and ongoing, long-term educational evaluation. Although these and other authors have recognized and study the role of robotics in education, this work is notable in that all aspects of the robot mechanism, electronics, software and educational curriculum were subject to ground-up, coordinated design [2,3,4,5,6,7]. A total of 30 Trikebot robots were built and used during this program. They continue to be used by graduates of the course at home. This paper focuses on the robot mechanism, electronics and programming interface design processes.