School Activities With Educational Robot to Facilitate Student Learning

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts even to young children has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends the lessons in the class with real life. In this chapter, school activities with educational robotics performed at both the special-needs education school and general public school were described. The students with mild intellectual disabilities and physically handicapped at the special needs school could build the robots nicely using small blocks and move them as they wanted through coding. The intellectual disabled students usually do not have enough long-term memory and are weak in abstraction but could develop the ability to actually understand logical thinking through hands-on learning with educational robotics. Through the present activities, the students including the public school could become aware of various goods around them programmed with coding and connect the learning in class to the real world.

Fostering Future Teachers' Competence in Computational Thinking in an Educational Technology Course

Computational thinking is considered a necessary skill in the 21st century. However, few teacher-education programs offer training for pre-service teachers to learn how to integrate computational thinking into the classroom. Pre-service teachers need to gain the knowledge and experience of computational thinking so that they are confident about designing relevant instructions in the future. The purpose of this chapter is to show how a free elective course in the teacher education program provides learning opportunities for them to develop their computational thinking skills and knowledge through the use of tangible objects. Samples of their works were analysed at different stages of learning to illustrate the technological pedagogical content knowledge of computational thinking. Overall, the study demonstrates that pre-service teachers were able to develop knowledge and attitudes towards computational thinking with their experience in the teacher education course.

Fostering Computational Thinking With Arduino and Lego Mindstorms

Educational robotics (ER) can be of great assistance to educators who aim to develop their students' computational thinking (CT) skills. The ideas of decomposing a problem, handling it more abstractly, looking for patterns, and creating algorithms for the solution can easily be explained through ER. The ER constructional part could be enhanced by DIY (do it yourself) trend and CoP (communities of practice) interactions while block-based or even text-based programming environments are used to program them. In this chapter, the authors present the most commonly used ER platforms, Arduino and Lego Mindstorms, as well as two projects that illustrate how CT characteristics are elicited by them.

Educational Robotics as a Tool for the Development of Collaboration Skills

There is a wide range of ongoing research focusing on educational robotics and its effects on the development of student skills. Most of the literature review pinpoints the fact that the involvement of students with educational robotics increases or develops teamwork or collaboration skills. In most cases, this is argued without presenting significant or specific measures or even significant observations in students' behavior. This first research attempt aims to deliver a framework in which students can develop collaboration skills through the use of educational robotics. In order to produce this framework, collaboration principles were molded within the proposed strategy. In addition, the implemented strategy was observed through the spectrum of developing the collaboration skills that Hesse and his colleagues proposed. At this point, there is a need to understand that collaboration is not viewed as the means to achieve the learning effects in this work, but collaboration has to be viewed as the final outcome of the educational robotics students' involvement.

Educational Robotics Between Coding and Engineering Education

The development and use of educational robotics offer almost unlimited chances for teaching design. In classrooms it results in numerous and continuously increasing possibilities for the promotion of competences and the differentiated and differentiating use of educational robots. Therefore, this paper reports long time experiences of the author and is intended to introduce into the history and the relevant literature of educational robotics in teaching settings, before it discusses the role of educational robots as technology artefacts, as educational technology and for technology education interconnected to coding and the engineering design process (edp). In addition, a structured overview is developed to provide orientation, discuss possible applications and offer basic assistance for teaching between coding and engineering.

Theories and Practices Behind Educational Robotics for All

The chapter aims at helping educators and classroom teachers who are new to using educational robotics as a learning tool in their classrooms. It discusses the approaches using robotics as a learning tool - a tool perfectly suited for enabling constructionist learning in the classroom and how educational robotics can provide ‘all' students motivation to learn STEM and computing science concepts. Educational robotics as a learning tool requires teachers as well as students to shift from traditional pedagogical approaches to learner-centered active learning approaches. The chapter discusses how the shift can be made in successful ways and provides guidance to pre- and in-service teachers on how to implement educational robotics as a learning tool to reach and attract ‘all' students to promote their learning.

Home Design Using Robotic Devices

Programming and robotics are critical thought-provoking concepts that shape STEM courses within secondary schools today. Their use in creating engaging, skill-building projects in technology education is constantly increasing worldwide. In this work, a novel learning scenario aiming at the design of 3D bioclimatic spaces is proposed. It combines Arduino microcontroller with 3D printing devices. The scenario is appropriate for the last grades of P-12 students and can be easily implemented in every secondary high or vocational school. It is fully compliant with most national ICT curricula adopted. The main objective is that students will enhance their critical thinking capacity, increase the level of digital literacy, and develop design skills by exploring and constructing appropriate 3d space models.

DuBot

This chapter presents the design and development of an open-source, low-cost robot for K12 students, suitable for use in educational robotics and science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM). The development of DuΒot is a continuation of previous research and robot's innovation is based on three axes: (a) its specifications came from the 1st cycle of action research; (b) robot's visual programming language is integrated into the robot, taking advantage of the fact that it can be programmed from any device (smartphone, tablet, PC) with an internet connection and without the need to install any software or app; (c) is low-cost with no “exotic” parts robot than anyone can build with less than 50€. Furthermore, the robot's initial evaluation is presented -from distance due to emergency restrictions of Covid-19 is presented by the University of Crete, Department of Preschool Education's students.

Educational Robotics in Primary Education

The purpose of this chapter is to review the literature referring to the utilization of educational robotics (ER) in primary education. Keyword-based search in particular bibliographic databases returned 21 journal papers for the eight-year period of 2012-2019. The factors that were studied in each of them are as follows: learning environment, area of knowledge/course subjects, pedagogical framework, learning activities, robotic equipment, research methodology, and main findings. The outcomes, among other things, showed that the majority of ER activities took place in a formal learning environment and that ER is appropriate for teaching subjects of STEM education. Though many researches took into account various learning theories that support collaboration, problem-solving, discovery, and construction of knowledge, there were some researches that lacked any pedagogical framework. In spite of the positive cognitive and affective outcomes of ER in learning, there are aspects that require further investigation.

Developing Pre-Service Teachers' STEM Skills With Raspberry Pi Activities

The aim of this study was to explore the development of pre-service primary school teachers' STEM skills with Raspberry Pi activities. Data were collected from 16 pre-service teachers through semi-constructed interviews, reports, and a questionnaire. The results of the qualitative analysis showed that the participants developed the STEM skills mentioned in the literature such as confidence, computing, problem-solving, creativity, technological skills, and enhanced the learning potential of robotics. Moreover, the ready-to-use Python codes on Raspberry Pi platform could be an effective strategy for pre-service teachers with lack of programming to provide solutions on real-world problems. In addition, the participants successfully connected the Raspberry Pi, sensor kits, and Python scripts with real-world problems. This equipment motivated them to transpose a real-world problem to school knowledge. According to the results the combination of Raspberry Pi, sensors, and Python helped the participants upskill in computing.