A Training Course in Educational Robotics for Learning Support Teachers

Abstract

This paper discusses the new implementation of a strengthened introductory training course in Educational Robotics for pre-service and in-service learning support teachers. By means of a final written questionnaire we compare the results of the course in 2015 with this year course, when the number of hours were doubled. This year participants expressed a higher appreciation and a better attitude towards robotics. Teachers agreed on the conviction that robotics can enhance students' motivation to learning and that educational robotics sustains a new point of view on science for teachers. Regarding the implementation in class, approximately two third of the participants declare they had already an idea on how to integrate robotics in curricula. More specifically, participants named ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders), ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), learning disabilities, mild mental retardation as aspects that can be effectively addressed by ER.

Implementation and Assessment Methodologies of Teachers’ Training Courses for STEM Activities

“…ER is an integrated approach to STEM (English 2016;Sanders 2008) which exploit specific pedagogical methodologies to help developing skills (Benitti 2012;Atmatzidou and Demetriadis 2016) allowing different speeds and learning styles (Urschitz and Moro 2014). ER is a powerful and versatile mean to address several questions and a variety of applications are possible, even with support teachers (Agatolio et al 2017). Not only ER, but also other activities such as Tinkering or Making can be incorporated into daily classroom activities.…”

An overview of teacher training programs in educational robotics: characteristics, best practices and recommendations

“…To be more precise, a lesson plan may be assigned as a follow-up activity after a training session (Nagchaudhuri and Mitra 2007) or the participants may be asked to create their own lesson plans and then discuss and/or present them in class (Kim et al ; Kim et al 2015). Participants may also be asked to create a pedagogical project to be applied in the classroom (Castro et al 2018), design their own robotics instructional materials for use in their future classes (Bers et al 2013), design worksheets that combine robotics and other subjects on the curriculum (Gilkes et al 2014) or develop multi-disciplinary didactic units and present them in class (Agatolio et al 2017). The training presented by Negrini (2019) moves a step further by suggesting that a database of robotics materials could be created and a community could be built to allow trainees to stay in contact after the training program has ended.…”

“…The publications in our sample underline the importance of collaboration among the training participants. In the study by Agatolio et al (2017), the teachers collaborated throughout the training program on developing the final project while in the study by Scaradozzi et al (2019), the trainees shared artefacts, compared different solutions and taught each other how to solve various types of problems. Similarly, in the study by Zhou et al (2015), the program incorporated a discussion session for sharing ideas on multidisciplinary ER activities.…”

Towards a Formal Definition of Educational Robotics

“…Likewise, the use of Educational Robotics (ER) has increased in the last two decades, as it is presented in Figure 1-b. Despite its increment, there is not a clear definition of what ER is and in many situations is mentioned just as a tool used in education [5], [6], [7] or as a vehicle to think about teaching, learning and education at large [8]. If ER is a merely tool, then several questions arise: What is robots' role in this "tool"?…”