A Blocks-based Visual Environment to Teach Robot-Programming to K-12 Students

Abstract

was selected for a three-year term as a Senior Faculty Fellow of NYU-SoE's Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. His scholarly activities have included 3 edited books, 7 chapters in edited books, 1 book review, 55 journal articles, and 109 conference papers. He has mentored 1 B.S., 16 M.S., and 4 Ph.D. thesis students; 31 undergraduate research students and 11 undergraduate senior design project teams; over 300 K-12 teachers and 100 high school student researchers; and 18 undergraduate GK-12 Fellows and 59 graduate GK-12 Fellows. Moreover, he directs K-12 education, training, mentoring, and outreach programs that currently enrich the STEM education of over 1,100 students annually.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015 Page 26.17.1 A Blocks-based Visual Environment to TeachRobot-Programming to K-12 Students IntroductionRecent years have witnessed a significant interest in the use of robotics in diverse educational contexts. First, use of robotics has been examined for informal learning as well as the formal school environment. 1,2 Second, students of both genders are known to react positively to robotics based learning. [3][4][5] Specifically, robotics programs can engage girls in learning and build their skills and confidence as they use tools and develop skills that may not always be available to them in traditional approaches to science and math classes. Third, numerous publications have considered the use of robotics for the entire spectrum of grade levels, As evidenced from the above, there exists a compelling opportunity to integrate the technology of robotics and student interest in gaming to teach computer programming to K-12 students and to enhance their lateral creativity for creative problem solving. 25,26 The idea of constructing and programming a physical robot makes the classroom come alive, allowing the students to understand that classroom math and science concepts are critical to solve real-world problems. Even as robot games are used to enrich students' math and science learning, it is of paramount importance that their heightened interest to learn new concepts be employed to engage them to learn fundamentals of computer programming. An early development of interest in math, science, and computer programming will enable students to remain interested in and excel in STEM disciplines as they progress through the educational pipeline. Finally, introduction to and engagement with hands-on STEM learning will encourage students to consider and pursue STEM studies and careers. 13,16Page 26.17.2In this paper, we consider the use of a blocks-based visual environment to demonstrate and teach robot-programming to K-12 students. Specifically, we present a visual programming environment built using the open-source, JavaScript-based, Blockly library 27 developed byGoogle. The standard Blockly library is capable of generating the JavaScript, XML, and Python codes corresponding to user-created, visual, block-based programs. In this paper, we extend the ability of the Blockly library to ...

The impact of robotics assisted programming education on academic success, problem solving skills and motivation

“…It is also indicated that these robot systems (PIC microcontroller, Arduino or Raspberry Pi based and programmed by Blockly), which do not require the installation of any additional software, can be used successfully even for 3 rd and 4 th grades. A Robot, developed by Yadagiri et al (2015) to teach basic concepts of programming by robot programming, a labyrinth based instructional game and results of another study in which block based visual robot programming tool was used, showed that use of such learning environments in programming education for 12 th grades facilitated fast, simple and entertaining learning.…”

Bringing active learning, experimentation, and student‐created videos in engineering: A study about teaching electronics and physical computing integrating online and mobile learning

“…The app allows the students to program an Arduino-compatible development board using the Bluetooth protocol through graphical blocks as Figure 3 shows. The blocks were created using the Google tool Blockly, which is a web engine tool that has been widely employed to teach programming languages from school to university levels and it acts as a parser and translator for the graphical blocks toward the selected programming language [22,68,80]. Using the blocks, the students can construct algorithms and interact with elements interfaced with the development board such as LCD, IoT devices, sensors, or robots.…”

Lições aprendidas usando Robótica Desplugada, Linguagens Baseadas em Blocos e Simulador Robótico 3D

“…Outros trabalhos que serão apresentados nesse capítulo foram obtidos na Revisão Inicial da Literatura. Os trabalhos de [Krishnamoorthy and Kapila 2016] e [Miller et al 2018] estão inteiramente relacionados a atividades desplugadas, enquanto que os trabalhos de [Bravo et al 2017], [Baião et al 2017], [Goud Yadagiri et al 2017], [Sales et al 2017] e [Queiroz et al 2017] estão mais relacionados à linguagens visuais e Robótica educacional. A Tabela 1 apresenta um resumo comparativo dos principais trabalhos correlatos a este.…”