The symbiotic relationship between educational robotics and computer science in formal education

Abstract

Educational Robotics (ER) has the potential to provide significant benefits to education, provided an increase in outreach by transitioning from the extra-curricular initiatives in which ER has thrived to formal education. As Computer Science (CS) Education is undergoing curricular reforms worldwide, the present study addresses the case of a Digital Education reform that included ER as a means to teach core CS concepts. Approximately 350 teachers from the first four grades of primary school participated in a mandatory two-year continuing professional development (CPD) program. The first year of the program was dedicated to CS and introduced teachers to CS Unplugged (CSU) and Robotics Unplugged (RU) activities. As such, we analyse the interplay between these activities and focus on teachers’ voluntary adoption of the proposed content in classrooms. This is complemented by an analysis of their perception and recommendation of ER. The findings highlight three main points. Firstly, ER benefits from the integration in the CS CPD, as this provides the necessary traction to introduce ER into teacher practices (the teachers freely devoted 2275 h to ER activities in their classrooms, over two years). Secondly, the presence of ER activities in the CS-CPD allows a higher proportion of teachers to adopt the CS content, as there are teachers that favour one type of activity over the other. Finally, the globally positive perception of ER registered in this study is relevant for two reasons: teachers were not voluntarily participating in the CPD, and results did not differ between pioneers and novices.

A case for co-construction with teachers in curricular reform: Introducing computer science in primary school

“…The case studies reported in this article are based on two popular CSU activities [3] for grades 1-4 (ages 5-9) from our regional CS curricular reform [16,17]: the robot game [40] and the sorting machine [2].…”

“…Each case study involved one grade 3 and one grade 4 class (students aged 7-9) and their respective in-service teachers with a researcher present to observe the sessions. The teachers that participated in the studies had completed the mandatory regional CS continuing professional development program headed by the department of education the previous year [16,17]. This involved 4 days of CS-related teacher training which targeted concepts of algorithms & programming, machines & networks, and information & data.…”

“…The program presented ready to use activities which combined different instruction modalities (i.e. using a combination of unplugged and plugged, robotic and non robotics activities) [16,17].…”

“…1) to pick up an object while avoiding obstacles. The activity is designed to kinaesthetically initiate students to the basics of algorithmics and CS concepts [16,40], all the while training the students' spatial abilities. During the activity, students must work in teams and alternate between the role of the robot (i.e.…”

“…This transversality can be achieved either by using CS content as a support for other disciplines [34,48] or by contributing to the development of transversal competencies. The above principle has motivated numerous researchers to investigate how CS, or Educational Robotics (often used as a medium to teach CS [16]) can be leveraged in various disciplinary contexts [8,20,32] such as maths [4,7,8,25,48], sciences [38,48], languages [42], or in the context of transversal skills such as creativity [50] and problem solving [10]. To the authors' knowledge, few have considered the teachers' perspective in such endeavours [9,20,31,48,50].…”