Recent technological advances require new learning and teaching methods and a reform of traditional school curricula to promote STEM and 21st-century skills. Educational robotics is considered a powerful tool, not only to learn programing, but also to enhance soft and transversal skills, such as problem-solving, metacognition, divergent thinking, creativity, and collaboration. This contribution presents a one-year research project aimed at integrating maker education and educational robotics into the primary and lower secondary school curriculum. The project is developed through a multidisciplinary and longitudinal approach and adopts the Design-Based Implementation Research methodology. It involved 50 fourth and fifth grade Italian students until the following school year. As an integrating background theme, we chose the 17 Goals outlined by the UN in the 2030 Agenda. Each selected goal was addressed by solving challenges in groups. Educational robotics became a tool for learning many concepts, such as renewable energies, human body systems or states of matter, but especially for working on creativity and ability to design, build, collaborate, and revise. We investigated students’ attitude toward STEM and 21st-century skills and their perceived school self-efficacy administrating two questionnaires pre and post the two parts of the project. This paper discusses findings on students’ attitude toward 21st-century skills. In the post analyzes of both Part 1 and 2, this field showed the highest scores compared to STEM fields. The pre-post data show an improvement in organizational, interpersonal, and leadership skills from Part 1, but also a gradual increase in personal and management skills.
In today’s world, technology and digital media are no longer separate, “other” than “natural” human and social life. Technology has become pervasive, transparent, reaching a “stable” form, no longer revolutionary. A new concept, “the post-digital,” is emerging and gradually taking hold in a wide range of fields. The resulting complexities call for overcoming the binary and hierarchical approach between theory and practice by rethinking traditional teaching patterns and remediating knowledge. Maker Education is moving in this direction. It is considered a technology-based extension of activism, developing STEAM and 21st-century skills. Its main exponents believe that it can “disrupt” or transform traditional educational methods. The Maker Movement, indeed, overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. This contribution presents an ongoing research project that aims to outline a proposal for integrating this approach into the primary and lower secondary school curriculum. We detected its impact on students’ school self-efficacy and attitude toward STEM and 21st-century skills. The results collected in the first part of the project look promising. The data underline the pupils’ interest in STEM subjects and the improvement of their organizational and interpersonal skills.
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