Abstract
Research has shown that educational robotics can be an effective tool to increase students’ acquisition of knowledge in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and promote, at the same time, a progression in the development of computational thinking (CT) skills in K–12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) education. Within this research field, the present study first sought to assess the effect of a robotics laboratory on the acquisition of CT-related skills in primary school children. The study also aimed to compare the magnitude of the effect of the laboratory across third- and fourth-grade students. For the purpose of the study, a quasi-experimental post-test-only design was adopted, and a group of 51 students, from third- and fourth-grade classrooms, participating in the robotics laboratories, were compared to a control group of 32 students from classrooms of the same grades. A set of Bebras tasks was selected as an overall measure of CT skills and was administered to children in both the intervention and control groups. Overall, the results showed that programming robotics artefacts may exert a positive impact on students’ learning of computational thinking skills. Moreover, the effect of the intervention was found to be greater among third-grade children.
Highlights
Project-based learning (PBL) is developing as a teaching and learning approach in which educators structure inquiry-based learning activities as early as in primary school [1]
Caution is needed when interpreting this result, given that the contest involves the participation of teams composed typically of four students, while children in the current study were asked to solve the tasks individually. This current work adds some additional evidence to existing research supporting the assumption that educational robotics is an effective tool for the development of computational thinking (CT) skills among students attending
Third- and fourth-grade students participating in a robotics laboratory, conducted with the support of the Lego® Education WeDo 2.0 kit, performed better on solving a set of
Summary
Project-based learning (PBL) is developing as a teaching and learning approach in which educators structure inquiry-based learning activities as early as in primary school [1]. Within this framework, students are involved in a series of collaborative and teacher-guided problem-solving activities that help them acquire new domain-specific knowledge and thinking skills that are useful in solving real-world problems, especially when technology is embedded to facilitate the learning process [2,3]. When applied to educational robotics, the PBL approach is intended to promote children’s constructionist learning through physical manipulation of artefacts that, in turn, is expected to stimulate the development of mental representations of the world around them [6]. The use of robotics as an educational tool requires children to explore, observe, and manipulate their environment, and reflect, Informatics 2019, 6, 43; doi:10.3390/informatics6040043 www.mdpi.com/journal/informatics
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