Educational robotics (ER) is becoming more prevalent in the educational experiences of children and adolescents. This trend is defining a new educational landscape, which has resulted in increased research efforts aimed at investigating the educational impact of robotics as well as its limitations and potentials.
Educational robotics is becoming more prevalent in children’s and young people’s educational experiences. Nonetheless, the manner in which robotics is introduced in educational settings is frequently regarded as unnecessarily narrow. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the scope of Educational Robotics and expand its pedagogical possibilities. To that end, the paper draws on the findings of two case studies conducted with primary and secondary school children to investigate their attitudes toward robots. These studies allow us to frame and identify five themes that we believe are particularly relevant to rethinking Educational Robotics pedagogy. We define a set of dimensions and paths to move Educational Robotics beyond the focus on technical skills and instead explore its potential as a boundary object to involve children in reflective processes around the ethical, social, and cultural implications of emerging technologies.
With advances in science and technology, several innovative studies have been developed in an attempt to solve the major problems associated with children’s learning. It is well understood that issues such as frustration and inattention, among others, have an impact on student learning. In this way, robotics is an important resource that can be used to help solve these problems, empowering our students to push their learning forward. In this case, robotic tools are typically used in two ways: as the primary focus and as a secondary focus. These paradigms, in fact, define how Educational Robotics is implemented in schools. The majority of approaches have made it the primary focus, which is teaching robotics.
There are numerous works that use robotics as a secondary focus, which are currently assisting the learning process in a variety of disciplines. The main contribution of this work is a complete three-step methodology for Robotics in Education that can be used alone or in conjunction with other topics to guide projects. Because the process is iterative and could improve the final results, our experiments demonstrate the importance of developing a study plan and evaluation method. As a novel contribution, we have joined and expanded on our previous work by proposing a new set of methods with guidelines and strategies for implementing the educational robotics standard curriculum for children. We propose a number of tools that have been developed to organise robotics learning topics for children, including the desired outcomes during the learning process. As previously stated, our current approach is divided into three steps setting establishing the environment, defining the project, and carrying out the evaluation The proposed curriculum divides robotics content into five categories: Robotics and Society, Mechanics, Electronics, Programming, and Control Theory are all areas of study.