¿Aprender con robótica en Educación Primaria? Un medio de estimular el pensamiento computacional

Abstract

Technology has transformed the social scenario by incorporating strategies, techniques and methods to obtain more significant educational processes. The main initiative promoted is the strengthening of skills and competencies in programming and computational thinking. This article evidences the effect of a training program on educational robotics on the acquisition of computational thinking and programming skills in young children. The research design is quasi-experimental, with pretest and post-test measures, with an experimental and control group. The sample of participants consists of 46 students of the first year of Primary Education, with age between 6 and 7 years, belonging to a Spanish educational centre. Computational thinking is measured through the dimensions: algorithmic thinking sequences, abstraction-patterns and debugging. The learning activities used in the intervention sessions were an adaptation of the training actions proposed in the robotics study program “TangibleK”. The results obtained in this study reveal positive effects concerning the performance achieved by the participants in the activities carried out. This indicates a significant effect on the strengthening of skills linked to computational thinking. The differences found between the pretest and post-test measures of the experimental group are statistically significant and superior to those presented by the control group. In this way, it was concluded that the participants of the training program in robotics and programming obtain a more significant advance in the three dimensions of the computational competence explored.