Abstract
Educational Robotics (ER) has the potential to provide significant benefits to education, provided an increase in outreach by transitioning from the extra-curricular initiatives in which ER has thrived to formal education. As Computer Science (CS) Education is undergoing curricular reforms worldwide, the present study addresses the case of a Digital Education reform that included ER as a means to teach core CS concepts. Approximately 350 teachers from the first four grades of primary school participated in a mandatory two-year continuing professional development (CPD) program. The first year of the program was dedicated to CS and introduced teachers to CS Unplugged (CSU) and Robotics Unplugged (RU) activities. As such, we analyse the interplay between these activities and focus on teachers’ voluntary adoption of the proposed content in classrooms. This is complemented by an analysis of their perception and recommendation of ER. The findings highlight three main points. Firstly, ER benefits from the integration in the CS CPD, as this provides the necessary traction to introduce ER into teacher practices (the teachers freely devoted 2275 h to ER activities in their classrooms, over two years). Secondly, the presence of ER activities in the CS-CPD allows a higher proportion of teachers to adopt the CS content, as there are teachers that favour one type of activity over the other. Finally, the globally positive perception of ER registered in this study is relevant for two reasons: teachers were not voluntarily participating in the CPD, and results did not differ between pioneers and novices.
Highlights
Educational Robotics (ER) envisions the use of robots as a tool to enhance teaching (Hamner et al, 2016) and learning (Miller & Nourbakhsh, 2016)
From a practitioners’ perspective, we evaluate the introduction of educational robotics into formal education through Computer Science (CS) curricular reform, from the lens of adoption and sustained adoption, a facet seldom explored in the literature on ER professional development (Schina et al, 2020)
The underlying research questions are the following: RQ1: To what extent do teachers adopt, i.e. freely decide to introduce, the ER activities in their practices with respect to the overall CS activities proposed in the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) program? RQ2: How does the introduction of ER through CS Education impact teachers’ perception of ER, in light of their background and their prior experience with ER? How does this influence their adoption of the CS content?
Summary
Educational Robotics (ER) envisions the use of robots as a tool to enhance teaching (Hamner et al, 2016) and learning (Miller & Nourbakhsh, 2016). A large number of studies have investigated the benefits of conducting ER activities: in addition to helping achieve the desired learning outcomes, they improve students’ motivation (Daniela & Lytras, 2019; Greca Dufranc et al, 2020) and support inclusive education (Daniela & Lytras, 2019); e.g. for students with special needs (Kim et al, 2015), different socio-economic status or culture (Eguchi, 2015) and / or gender (Sullivan & Bers, 2019) These advantages are perceived by both researchers and teachers (Chevalier et al, 2016; Castro et al, 2018; Khanlari, 2019; Negrini, 2019, 2020), the struggle to integrate ER into formal education is well documented (Eguchi, 2014; Chevalier et al, 2016; Benitti & Spolaôr, 2017; Negrini, 2020). ER-related curricular reform still seems to be a distant reality in most countries
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