Pre-service and in-service teachers’ interest, knowledge, and self-confidence in using educational robotics in learning activities

João Manuel Nunes Piedade

doi:10.25053/redufor.v6i1.3345

Abstract

This paper presents a study that aims to analyze the interest, knowledge, problem-solving skills, and self-confidence of the pre-service and in-service teachers in using educational robotics for teaching purposes, in particular, to teach programming and computational thinking in primary and secondary education. In the portuguese context, it is mandatory to attend a masters in teaching in order to become a teacher in primary and secondary education. These pre-service teacher training programs are organized in several dimensions, such as specific didactics, general education, scientific area. Computational Thinking, programming, and robotics have been integrated into the schools’ curriculum in many countries. Accordingly, it is essential to analyze the teachers’ preparation to teach these thematic trends. A descriptive and exploratory quantitative approach was implemented with 49 participants. The results pointed out a positive level of interest, educational robotics knowledge, problem-solving, self-confidence of both pre-service and in-service teachers.

Highlights

IntroductionIt is mandatory to attend a master in teaching in order to become a teacher in primary and secondary education
This paper presents a study developed with pre-service and in-service informatics teachers who are or were attending the master in teaching informatics at the University of Lisbon.In the portuguese context, it is mandatory to attend a master in teaching in order to become a teacher in primary and secondary education
To analyze the levels of interest, problem-solving, educational robotics knowledge, and self-confidence presented by the participants (Q1 and Q2), a matrix of descriptive scores of each item was constructed (Appendix B)

Summary

Introduction

It is mandatory to attend a master in teaching in order to become a teacher in primary and secondary education. These pre-service teacher training programs are organized in several dimensions, such as specific didactics, general education, scientific area (e.g., mathematics, informatics, sciences, among others), and professional practice initiation. During this program, pre-service informatics teachers learn about education, research methods, curriculum and assessment, and didactics of informatics and start the initiation of teaching with real classes of students. The curricular guidelines refer that all students need to learn about CT and programming concepts, design algorithms, programming with blocks applications, programming robots, and other tangible objects, and use digital technologies to create new knowledge (DGE - Minister of Education, 2017)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion