A Systematic Review on Continuing Education of Teachers for Educational Robotics

Pre-service teachers’ perceptions towards integrating educational robotics in the primary school

“…In this context, the project of which this study is a part aimed to study how ITT can contribute to the proper integration of ER into the teaching practices of PST who teach mathematics. In doing so, we seek to respond to the identified limitations in curricular integration of ER (Kim, 2019;Sapounidis & Alimisis, 2021) and importance of PST experiencing ER integration in their teaching practices (Oliveira et al, 2023;Schina et al, 2021b). When it comes to ER, it is important to design ITT programs in a way that enables PST to experience the integration of ER in practical and contextualized situations, similar to any other technology (Huang & Zbiek, 2017).…”

“…The design also considered aspects that influence PST integration of ER into mathematics teaching and learning processes. Of those we highlight the influence of lesson plan design competence in PST integration of ER in their teaching practices (Schmid et al, 2021;Tankiz & Uslu, 2022), the need for specific training for the development of teachers' didactic knowledge (Zhong & Xia, 2020), and the importance of allowing PST to experience the integration of ER in their teaching practices during the practicum (Oliveira et al, 2023;Schina et al, 2021b), supported by the reflective process of design and implementation of learning scenarios (Matos, 2014;Pedro et al, 2019;. By doing so, we expected to foster PST acceptance of ER, thus increasing their willingness to integrate it into their teaching practices (Neophytou & Eteokleous, 2022).…”

“…In the case of Portugal, in addition to alignment with these international guidelines, programming and educational robotics (ER) appear in the primary school mathematics curricula associated with the development of computational thinking skills (Ministério da Educação [Ministry of Education], 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d. ER is a subject of growing interest (I) in the scientific community (Anwar et al, 2019;Benitti, 2012;Jung & Won, 2018;López-Belmonte et al, 2021;Oliveira et al, 2023;Sapounidis et al, 2023;Toh et al, 2016;Xia & Zhong, 2018) in areas as diverse as the use of social robots in classrooms (Smakman et al, 2022;Woo et al, 2021), music teaching (Martinez-Roig et al, 2023) or to promote curricular integration (El-Hamamsy et al, 2021;Kim, 2019;Sapounidis & Alimisis, 2021). Integration of ER in classroom settings has the potential to promote meaningful learning (Athanasiou et al, 2019;Zhong & Xia, 2020), such as in the development of computational thinking skills (Dong et al, 2023;Louka & Papadakis, 2023), STEM subjects (Kim et al, 2015;Sapounidis et al, 2023), physics (Addido et al, 2023) and mathematics (Zhong & Xia, 2020), with a growing number of countries 2 / 24 including ER as an optional component in the curriculum (Mangina et al, 2023).…”

“…The tendency for a large proportion of studies to focus on the technological component of ER (robotics, mechatronics, and programming)-or to seek close curricular connections to these areas-as identified by Benitti (2012) still holds (Angeli & Jaipal-Jamani, 2018;Arocena et al, 2022;López-Belmonte et al, 2021;Sapounidis et al, 2023). It is important that research on ER give greater relevance to pedagogical and didactic issues (Alimisis, 2012;Jung & Won, 2018;Oliveira et al, 2023), and seek to further understand its integration in the classroom (Arocena et al, 2022) and how to promote curricular articulation and integration (El-Hamamsy et al, 2021;Kim, 2019;Sapounidis & Alimisis, 2021). The integration of ER in teaching and learning processes enhances the creation of favorable conditions for meaningful learning (Athanasiou et al, 2019;Zhong & Xia, 2020) and for interdisciplinarity (Kuhl et al, 2019;Miller & Nourbakhsh, 2016), and its alignment with the essential digital competencies proposed in the DigCompEdu framework is unquestionable (Heinmäe et al, 2022;Redecker, 2017).…”

“…In in-service teacher education, the possibility for teachers to articulate training in ER with implementing ER in their teaching practice is highlighted as a success factor (Anwar et al, 2019;Schina et al, 2021a). Although some works in ITT include this feature (e.g., Kucuk & Sisman, 2017;Luciano et al, 2019), this limitation persists (e.g., Angeli & Jaipal-Jamani, 2018;Oliveira et al, 2023;Schina et al, 2021a). Regarding training needs in programming and robotics, in the Portuguese context the teaching community's I stands out especially in training on ER, construction of programmable robots,…”