Crab Robot: A Comparative Study Regarding the Use of Robotics in STEM Education

Abstract

Educational robotics has proved to be a propulsive pedagogical tool for the recovery of students’ interest, creativity, imagination, and logical reasoning, as well as assisting in the development of critical thinking, motor coordination, teamwork, and problem solving through hits and errors. The objective of this study was to verify the effectiveness of the use of Robotics as a pedagogical tool through a qualitative–quantitative research study with students in the fourth year of primary education, in the science discipline in an elementary public school in Sao Jose dos Pinhais (South of Brazil), with content on invertebrate animals. The study was carried out in two groups of the fourth year. Both underwent initial diagnostic evaluations, and one received the content in a traditional way, while the other followed the same planning but with the intervention of Robotics in parallel. The qualitative analysis considered the students’ reports after the development of the activity. Regarding the quantitative analysis, we used the statistical tests of hypotheses, Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney medians and Student’s t-test, for comparison of means, from which it was possible to show that the group that received the test content with robotics had a better performance in relation to the appropriation of the content.