In this paper, we will discuss the design and implementation of three educational robotics workshops that focus on the use of robotics for addressing real-world societal problems. Through the workshops, we aimed to investigate how the integration of real-world problems to robotics can provide a multidisciplinary approach for child-robot interaction that allows students to engage with different STE(A)M concepts. In addition, we examined if this integration increased or strengthened students' interest in STEM/robotics education and careers. The workshops were designed and implemented in the context of the European project Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM) with students from different age groups using Lego Mindstorms and Arduino kits.
During the last two decades, activities with robots have progressively found their way in formal educational Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now supports three different publication options:
• ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single-spaced in Verdana 7 point font. Please do not change the size of this text box. Each submission will be assigned a unique DOI string to be included here. systems. In parallel, in the last few years there has been a big effort worldwide, for the inclusion of all young learners in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education and for their attraction to STEM-related careers. However, regarding STEM education, educational robotics activities often focus either on the ‘Technology’ (programming) or the ‘Engineering’ (constructing) element of STEM, with the ‘Science’ and ‘Mathematics’ lying somewhere on the background. In addition, there is a lack of robotics activities which connect robotics and STEM to realworld situations by, for example, implementing robotic solutions for common societal issues. Most of the approaches do not empower children to define problems that influence their lives and provide them with the necessary skills to solve these. However, this connection is quite important for the attraction of more students both to STEM education and also to STEM and robotics careers. We believe that in order to gain and sustain students’ interest to STEM, their interaction with robotics should occur in an authentic and multidisciplinary context which provides a view of how robotics are used in real-world situations. In this paper, we will discuss three workshops that engaged students in the discussion, design, construction and presentation of robotic constructions for solving real-world problems. The workshops’ activities integrated elements from the production process and resemble the use of robotics in realistic situations. The robotic activities based on the constructionist learning approach [2]. Thus they supported meaning generation and exchange of ideas through collaboration, experimentation and construction. Our aim was to investigate how the connection of robotics to real-world problems through open, constructionist activities can provide an authentic and multidisciplinary context for future robotics activities. The workshops were designed and implemented as part of the European project ER4STEM, a three-year project funded by the European Commission that focuses on the development of an integrated framework for the different approaches in using robotics in education [3].
One of the ER4STEM targets is tο study real-world societal problems as perceived by each child and relate societal challenges to existing technologies. Thus, we implemented a number of workshops that focus on recognizing and addressing such issues with the use of robotics. The workshops were designed with the “activity plan template”, a design tool for planning robotics activities that depicts what we have identified as essential and transferrable elements of learning with robotics [4]. An activity plan for a workshop, apart from the sequence and description of activities, it also contains information about the focused STEM concepts and learning skills, the expected outcomes, the collaboration methods etc. The workshops presented in this paper, involved students in a real-world problematic situation, through three important processes for constructionist learning with robots: Construction, Programming and Argumentation. While students are switching between these three processes, they express their personal perceptions and ideas on the problem and discuss suggested solutions. They also apply knowledge from different STEM fields in an authentic context in order to create personally meaningful objects and address realworld societal needs. Through this process, we aim to support students to connect robots to their personal interests and share their ideas with these tangible artefacts while learning basic scientific concepts.
In the above context, we will discuss the design, implementation and preliminary results of three educational robotics workshop organized with different age groups. All of them engaged students with a societal issue which they had to address, with the use of robotics. For the evaluation of these workshops we focused on evidence of students’ engagement with STEM concepts (all data), discussion on societal issues (videos), change of interest to STEM or STEM careers (questionnaires, interviews), development of the necessary skills to address such issue such as collaboration, creativity, communication
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