Robotics Education in STEM Units: Breaking Down Barriers in Rural Multigrade Schools

Abstract

We report a novel proposal for reducing the digital divide in rural multigrade schools, incorporating knowledge of robotics with a STEM approach to simultaneously promote curricular learning in mathematics and science in several school grades. We used an exploratory qualitative methodology to implement the proposal with 12 multigrade rural students. We explored the contribution of the approaches to the promotion of curricular learning in mathematics and science and the perceptions of using robotics to learn mathematics and science. As data collection techniques, we conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with the participants and analyzed their responses thematically. We concluded that the proposal could contribute to meeting the challenges of multigrade teaching. Our findings suggest that the proposal would simultaneously promote the development of curricular learning in mathematics and science in several school grades, offering an alternative for addressing various topics with different degrees of depth.

Voice-Controlled Robotics in Early Education: Implementing and Validating Child-Directed Interactions Using a Collaborative Robot and Artificial Intelligence

“…The application of robotics within educational settings has emerged as a transformative force, promising to redefine the pedagogical landscape for the 21st-century learner [1]. Integrating robotics in early education fosters technological literacy and cultivates essential skills such as creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving, all pivotal within the STEM domain [2].…”

The Impact of Educational Robotics on Cognitive Outcomes in Primary Students: A Meta-Analysis of Recent Studies

“…However, to be effective, teaching needs to be revised and it should embody new forms of competency learning, so that students do not memorize rotely, but can instead digest concepts through the usage of state-of-art technologies (Campos & Munoz, 2023). A practical way to make learning content go hand-in-hand with technology within educational settings is educational robotics (Castro et al, 2022). Over the past few years, the use of educational robotics has gained momentum in educational policies worldwide, including primary education (Madariaga et al, 2023;Yu et al, 2023).…”