Control Technologies as Mind-Tools

Abstract

In mathematics education, especially in early childhood that is considered the most formative period in children's lives, there is an always growing need to design, test, and validate tools and activities that take advantage of recent pedagogical and technological advancements but still focus on the creative learning process, instead of quantifying the outcomes and emphasizing numerical data and performance. Educational robotics as a context for interdisciplinary problem-solving scenarios in preschool education can be an interesting starting point, since modern control technologies are usually thought to provide a rich variety of mind-tools that encourage active learning and children's creative thinking. Such activities may stimulate students to “do” mathematics in a seamless, creative, playful way in order to solve meaningful and appealing (for them) problems. The study tries to explore and validate emerging preschoolers' opportunities to unconsciously “mathematize” their environment in everyday playful robotics activities in the context of brief teaching experiments.