Watching, creating and achieving: Creative technologies as a conduit for learning in the early years

Abstract

This paper describes the use of robotics in an Early Years classroom as a tool to aid the development of technological skills in a creative environment rich with literacy and numeracy opportunities. The pilot project illustrates how a three-phase process can result in the development of: (1) emergent literacy and numeracy, (2) digital access for disadvantaged Early Years learners and (3) basic engineering concepts. The pilot study was conducted with a class of 16 students aged between 5 years and 6 months to 7 years, over a 6-week period. During this period, the students were introduced to and engaged in the creation of robots and simple machines via the use of a commercial robotics package. The pilot was designed around three distinct phases: modelling, exploring and evaluating. These phases provided scaffolding for the students to engage with the technology and for the class teacher to develop her own skills. The use of this particular robotics package is unique to Australia, unique to Early Years, and links hands-on, fine-motor development with 21st century learning. The researchers and authors of this paper are currently based at the Australian Catholic University and are involved with projects involving creative, digital technologies, children in the early years of formal schooling, emerging literacy and numeracy for diverse Early Years learners and the development of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.

Systematic Review of Research Trends in Robotics Education for Young Children

“…Although those areas were not the main targeted topics of the studies, the research mentioned those effects as unexpected but very impressive findings [20,22,23,43,57,58]. We also agree that those areas of findings were very significant in that the children's expanded intrapersonal and interpersonal attitudes were the core dimension of the children's holistic development.…”

“…However, we noticed that relatively few studies (three) aimed to investigate the nature or characteristics of young children's robotics learning process [22,38,71].…”

“…It was noticed that the achievements were reported in a way that connected them to knowledge and skills of different subject areas (e.g., numeracy, scientific inquiry skills, and literacy) [20][21][22][23][24][25]. For instance, from a micro-ethnographic case study approach, McDonald and Howell's study showed that a robotics project positively impacted five-and seven-year-old children's literacy development and numeracy skills [22]. While engaging in robotics activities, the young children expanded their terminology and employed more complex sentence structures to explain robots' behaviors or explain their ideas.…”

Applying Robotics in School Education: a Systematic Review

“…In his review, Benitti noted the lack of studies covering the usage of robots as a teaching aid for children of kindergarten age and 11-12 graders. Benitti has assumed that the lack of research on the use of robots in kindergartens was due to the minimum age (7 years) limitation on the Lego robot kit, which did not prove true, as two studies (Sullivan et al, 2013;McDonald et al, 2012) clearly use Lego kits in order to identify the role of technology in early childhood education. Another study, focusing on early childhood, deals with the effect of the new technology offered to professionals in kindergarten education -humanoid robot, based on social interaction and providing aid to the staff for engaging children in educational games (Fridin, 2014).…”

“…they are usually used in the after-school or summer camp program. Exceptions were introduced by five articles, one of which noted that teachers integrated their work into conventional teaching (Varney et al, 2012;), three articles described the use of robots by teachers in one of their classes (Mills et al, 2013;McDonald et al, 2012;Fridin, 2014), while the remaining article evaluated different methods of implementing of the program into the educational curriculum of 5 schools (Nicholas et al, 2012).…”