Abstract
This paper reports a case study, developed in K-12 Portuguese Education, that aimed to analyze the computer science teachers’ knowledge, interest, and self-confidence to use educational robotics and other programable objects in classroom activities to teach computer science concepts and to promote students’ computational thinking skills. The research design was organized into a descriptive and exploratory quantitative approach. The participants were 174 in-service computer science teachers of Portuguese public education. The data was gathered from the participants, through the online application of the Robotics Interest Questionnaire scale (RIQ). Very positive levels of teacher’s knowledge, interest, and self-efficacy to use educational robotics for teaching purposes were reported in the study outcomes. These constructs were underlined in several studies as relevant factors to promote the use of educational robotics and other similar technologies by the teachers. Despite the study limitations and the small context, a set of relevant results was highlighted on computer science in-service teachers’ interest and preparation to use robotics and to support their students in learning activities with these artifacts.
Highlights
Computational thinking, coding, programming, and robotics have emerged, in the last decade, as thematic trends in scholarly and research contexts
It is important to stimulate learning with technology, and learning about technology, which involves computational thinking, programming, and robotics
In the dimensions ‘Interest’, ‘Problem-solving’ and ‘Working Collaboratively’ the results of the test reported significant differences between the ‘40 to 49’ and ‘>50’ groups. These findings suggest that the group aged 40 to 49 years old have higher levels of interest, problem-solving, and working collaboratively skills on educational robotics use than the other groups
Summary
Computational thinking, coding, programming, and robotics have emerged, in the last decade, as thematic trends in scholarly and research contexts. Authors such as [1] refer the need to consider the existence of computer science teaching in basic and secondary education. ), using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system”. 32), in a seminal paper, characterized computational thinking as “solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the contents fundamental to computer science This wide definition for CT clearly relates to mathematical thinking. Step-by-step responses to problem-solving are at the core of
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