Do lego mindstorms robots have a future in CS education?

McNallyMyles,; GoldweberMichael,; FaginBarry,; KlassnerFrank,

doi:10.1145/1124706.1121362

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…They provide practice platform for science and mathematics principles (Rogers & Portsmore, 2004), and increased students problem solving skills (Beer et al, 1999;Nourbakhsh et al, 2004;Petre & Price, 2004;Robinson, 2005;Rogers & Portsmore, 2004). However, some studies could not find positive effect of robotics in educational settings (Bjoerner, 2009;Fagin & Merkle, 2003;Hussain, Lindh, & Shukur, 2006;McNally, Goldweber, Fagin, & Klassner, 2006).…”

Section: Coachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Design and development issues for educational robotics training camps

Üçgül

Çağıltay

2013

Int J Technol Des Educ

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The aim of this study is to investigate the critical design and development issues for educational robotics training camps. More specifically, the purpose of the study is to explore and describe critical design issues for educational robotics training camps, illustrating how each factor affects robotic camps and enlightening how these factors should be implemented for the design of a robotic training camp. For this purpose, two robotic training camps were organized with elementary school students. Thirty children attended the first camp and twenty two children attended to the second one. The research design was qualitative in nature, more specifically; multiple-case design approach was used. Interviews with children and instructors, observations, field notes, and camp evaluation forms were the data collection methods. The data were analyzed through the qualitative data analysis techniques. The data were categorized under emerged themes, learning outcomes, evaluation of the camps' components, career, group issues, competition, coaching, technical issues, challenges and camp duration. Some prominent findings of the study are; the instruction strategy for a robotics camp should be designed from simple to complex. The most effective and liked part of the camps are project studies, therefore projects studies should be encouraged at robotic camps. Robotics training camps should give chance to practice to the children v what they have learned at schools. The group size should be arranged that every child in the group should have duties at any time. The study was concluded with a robotics camp design guideline and a sample robotic training camp curriculum.

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Section: Coachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…McNally, Goldweber, Fagin, and Klassner (2006) focused on disadvantages of the robots in educational settings. They defined logistical and pedagogical disadvantages.…”

Section: Coachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and development issues for educational robotics training camps

Üçgül

Çağıltay

2013

Int J Technol Des Educ

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“…This study utilized LEGO Mindstorms robotic activities in a university introductory computer programming course by supplementing course material with a three week long series of robotics labs. This approach was chosen both for reasons relating to experimental design and because computer science education literature revealed the practice as a common way of incorporating LEGO Mindstorms into introductory computer programming courses [1,6,8]. Some of the responses to follow-up questions in the study suggest that spreading out the robotic activities throughout the entire semester might be more effective and less intimidating.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Today, the use of LEGO Mindstorms robotic activities has become common in not just grades K-12, but also at the college level [1,5,6]. Although there have been conflicting studies and discussions focusing on these activities' effects relating to student performance [4,8], it is still widely believed that the use of LEGO Mindstorms provides students with a motivating learning environment. Certain aspects of student motivation have been shown to significantly impact learning strategies [2,10], such as critical thinking and metacognition, required to effectively learn computer programming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do LEGO® Mindstorms® motivate students in CS1?

McWhorter

O'Connor

2009

Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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The purpose of the research study described in this paper was to investigate the effectiveness of using LEGO Mindstorms robotic activities to influence student motivation in an introductory university computer programming course. Various aspects relating to student motivation were measured using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. Tests revealed no statistically significant differences between groups in relation to intrinsic goal orientation, task value, control of learning beliefs, self-efficacy, and test anxiety at the alpha = .05 level. The experiment did detect a statistically significant difference between groups in relation to extrinsic goal orientation. The LEGO group, however, showed a larger decrease in levels of extrinsic goal orientation, suggesting they were less motivated in learning the material for rewards such as grades. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, ideally a decline in extrinsic goal orientation would be accompanied by a statistically significant increase in intrinsic goal orientation suggesting students were instead motivated because they were interested in the content of the material. This was not the case in this study. Despite the lack of positive quantitative results, responses to student follow-up questions suggest that at least some of the students enjoyed the LEGO Mindstorms activities. A discussion of possible factors influencing these results is provided.

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“…LegoMS has an appealing notation and is used only with relatively expensive Lego robots. However, the development of complex behaviors may become difficult [26]. The increasing number of blocks and the size of the diagram make it difficult to analyze and read the program solution.…”

Section: Legomentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging teenagers feedback in the development of a domain-specific language

Barisic

Cambeiro

Amaral

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) empower end-users to express software tasks that were traditionally developed by software engineers. DSLs allow users to express themselves in terms closer to the way they think about their problems, rather than in computational terms. However, conceiving a DSL with an adequate user experience for its end-users is not a trivial task, and the process of engineering that adequacy tends to be performed ad-hoc. The Gyro Creator Language (GCL) is an open-source DSL for controlling low-cost rover-like Arduino robots, designed for being used by teenagers with no previous computing skills, so they can be introduced to programming in a fun way. In this paper, we discuss an iterative process building on teenagers' early feedback, collected in a series of empirical evaluations with 128 teenagers, and how this has helped us driving GCL to a competitive level in terms of usability, when compared to well-established alternatives such as Lego, or Scratch.

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Do lego mindstorms robots have a future in CS education?

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Design and development issues for educational robotics training camps

Design and development issues for educational robotics training camps

Do LEGO® Mindstorms® motivate students in CS1?

Leveraging teenagers feedback in the development of a domain-specific language

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