Robotics is a powerful tool in education and it has gained a notable impact in the field of teaching computer science, engineering, math, physics and similar. As educational robotics laboratories stimulate many different abilities in students, such as problem solving and group working, it is possible to use robotics to promote soft skills as well. Soft skills are necessary to complement hard skills to build the 21st century professionalism, so it seems relevant to start promoting these skills as soon as possible. In this paper, we describe a lab for primary and first grade secondary schools in which robotics is employed to train soft skills in an informal context.

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This paper presents a pilot study on the use of artificial life software in an educational setting. Two groups of high school students received a standard lesson in evolutionary biology followed by a software session. The experimental group used the suite of artificial life software presented in this paper; the control group used a commercial multimedia hypertext. At the end of the software session both groups were asked to fill in a simple multiple-choice questionnaire testing the students' knowledge of various aspects of evolutionary biology. The results show that the group using the artificial life software performed significantly better than the control group. We argue that the experimental group may learn more effectively because the artificial life makes it possible for students to perform experiments, a possibility not available to the control group.

Robotics has gained, in recent years, a significant role in educational processes that take place in formal, non-formal, and informal contexts, mainly in the subjects related to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Indeed, educational robotics (ER) can be fruitfully applied also to soft skills, as it allows promoting social links between students, if it is proposed as a group activity. Working in a group to solve a problem or to accomplish a task in the robotics field allows fostering new relations and overcoming the constraints of the established links associated to the school context. Together with this aspect, ER offers an environment where it is possible to assess group dynamics by means of sociometric tools. In this paper, we will describe an example of how ER can be used to foster and assess social relations in students' group. In particular, we report a study that compares: (1) a laboratory with robots, (2) a laboratory with Scratch for coding, and (3) a control group. This study involved Italian students attending middle school. As the focus of this experiment was to study relations in students' group, we used the sociometric tools proposed by Moreno. Results show that involving students in a robotics lab can effectively foster relations between students and, jointly with sociometric tools, can be employed to portrait group dynamics in a synthetic and manageable way.