Methodology and Results on Teaching Maths Using Mobile Robots

Ferrarelli, Paola; Lapucci, Tamara; Iocchi, Luca

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70836-2_33

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…For example, ROBIN is an agent learning companion that provides cognitive and social feedback on the students' programming task to move a Lego Ⓡ Mindstorms Ⓡ robot Ahmed et al (2018). Programming a small mobile robot with a sequence of commands has been used to illustrate concepts of Mathematics and Geometry to very young children (pre-school and primary school) Ferrarelli et al (2017).…”

Section: Educational Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Newtonian Physics through Programming Robot Experiments

Ferrarelli

Iocchi

2021

Tech Know Learn

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Novel technology has been applied to improve students’ learning abilities in different disciplines. The research in this field is still finding suitable methodologies, tools, and evaluation mechanisms to devise learning frameworks with high impact on students’ performance. This article describes an instructional method to perform Newtonian physics experiments by programming a mobile robot. Such experiments allow the learners to design, implement and visualize physics concepts, thus using the robot as a cognitive tool or mindtool . An accurate assessment of the students learning gain, involving 29 high-school students, shows that the proposed method provided significant improvements in the students understanding of the first Newton’s law, the second Newton law and the superposition principle. The learning gain has been measured through the Force Concept Inventory questionnaire. From this study, we can state that programming a mobile robot to perform physics experiments can improve knowledge about Newtonian physics, even without giving specific lectures in the subject and with a much shorter lecture plan with respect to traditional lectures.

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Section: Educational Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Newtonian Physics through Programming Robot Experiments

Ferrarelli

Iocchi

2021

Tech Know Learn

Self Cite

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“…The results suggest that this activity improves the children's performance and that children enjoy the interaction very much. Another interesting work in the field of kindergarten education with robots is [25]. The authors show that better learning results can be achieved by motivating pre-school children to solve algebra exercises when robots are supporting the learning activity.…”

Section: Robots In Pre-schoolmentioning

confidence: 99%

ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age

Schiffer

Ferrein

2018

MTI

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In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents.

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“…He used the LOGO programming language to teach geometry and found that ER improves children's motivation, learning and interaction in the classroom [24]. Given such premises, it is thus surprising to find that only a limited number of studies explore the benefits of introducing robotics into formal mathematics education [11,29]. In 2019, Leoste and Heidmets [21] conducted a longitudinal study with students from 20 classes, confirming that the use of ER in mathematics lessons improved students' learning outcomes on a national standardised assessment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the role of educational robotics in formal mathematics education: the case of geometry for 15-year-old students

Brender¹,

El-Hamamsy²,

Bruno³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Research has shown that Educational Robotics (ER) enhances student performance, interest, engagement and collaboration. However, until now, the adoption of robotics in formal education has remained relatively scarce. Among other causes, this is due to the difficulty of determining the alignment of educational robotic learning activities with the learning outcomes envisioned by the curriculum, as well as their integration with traditional, non-robotics learning activities that are well established in teachers' practices. This work investigates the integration of ER into formal mathematics education, through a quasi-experimental study employing the Thymio robot and Scratch programming to teach geometry to two classes of 15-year-old students, for a total of 26 participants. Three research questions were addressed: (1) Should an ER-based theoretical lecture precede, succeed or replace a traditional theoretical lecture? (2) What is the students' perception of and engagement in the ER-based lecture and exercises? (3) Do the findings differ according to students' prior appreciation of mathematics? The results suggest that ER activities are as valid as traditional ones in helping students grasp the relevant theoretical concepts. Robotics activities seem particularly beneficial during exercise sessions: students freely chose to do exercises that included the robot, rated them as significantly more interesting and useful than their traditional counterparts, and expressed their interest in introducing ER in other mathematics lectures. Finally, results were generally consistent between the students that like and did not like mathematics, suggesting the use of robotics as a means to broaden the number of students engaged in the discipline.

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Methodology and Results on Teaching Maths Using Mobile Robots

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Learning Newtonian Physics through Programming Robot Experiments

Learning Newtonian Physics through Programming Robot Experiments

ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age

Investigating the role of educational robotics in formal mathematics education: the case of geometry for 15-year-old students

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