Students’ Engagement through Computational Thinking and Robotics

Abstract

Nowadays, school systems are underlining the relevance of “computational thinking” and educational robotics not only in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, but also in other humanistic disciplines as reinforcement of student creativity and problem-solving capacity. This paper presents an example of educational robotics tool used to engage students in their learning process through the manipulation and construction of artifacts.

The Design and Implementation of an Open-source Programmable Bot for Educational Purposes

“…The widespread availability of electronics prototyping platforms like Arduino, Raspberry PI, micro:bit has a decisive impact on a simplified adoption of a wide range of entry-level skills in the ER and STEM in general (Brand, Roy, Ray, Oberlin, & Oberlix, 2018;Kalelioglu & Sentance, 2020;MErino et al, 2018). Since the seminal work of Eguchi (Amy Eguchi, 2010), researchers have continuously explored the ER field in view of its inherent closeness to the principles of computational (Amy Eguchi, 2016;M. Tramonti & Dochshanov, 2018) and algorithmic thinking (Evripidou, Amanatiadis, Christodoulou, & Chatzichristofis, 2021;Matyushchenko, Zvereva, & Lavina, 2020), problem-solving (Caballero-Gonzalez, Muñoz-Repiso, & García-Holgado, 2019Kamga, Romero, Komis, & Mirsili, 2017) and project-based learning methodologies (Cocota, D'Angelo, & de Barros Monteiro, 2015).…”